This is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

“Apophenic as a haruspex[.]” That was the note I had written myself.

I had already decided to be enchanted by This is How You Lose the Time War, the epistolary novel to end all epistolary novels, when this line bonked against my brain like a nerf bat. Yeah, I know nerf is a capitalized trademarked, but in the spirit of the time war, let’s engage in a little genericide, shall we? Ah, yes, one of those reviews, the punchy ones; How I imagine Ulysses would sound if it was written in 2019. Stream of consciousness, but make it twitter.

Ok, back to Time War, which means back to “apophenic as a haruspex.” You know how your friends can do something that is kind of dumb, and you’ll be like, “Nah, man, that’s no problem,” and legit mean it? But when you see something petty and irritating at work—a window left open overnight, or an old yogurt left in the fridge—and you’re about to say something snarky to someone, really make a federal case about careless use of windows like the high-horse pendant you most certainly sometimes are, but right before you launch into a “Fresh Air, at What Cost?” monologue you get a text from a coworker that you are friendly with after work hours, too, and she’s like, “Hey, I left the window open near my desk last night, could you close it for me please 😄” and all of a sudden it’s all gravy, baby? Who even cares about the windows, windows are made to be opened and this office gets stuffy all the time, right?

This powerful hypocrisy, please say it limited to not just me.

Anyway, if another book threw “apophenic as a haruspex” in my face I would have tossed it right back into the library return pile. C’MON! But I had decided already that Time War was my friend, so it got a pass for what was the literary equivalent of going to a backyard barbecue and wealthily announcing, “How quaint, this calls to mind my time back at Harvard Law, when I too would deign to supp upon grilled burgers.” You know the voice I am implying. Yeah, that one. Window open? Apophenic as a haruspex? Who cares, it’s clever, Time War can do whatever it wants, I got your back, babe.

Apophony, to save you from the work that halted my forward progress on this speedy little scifi romp, is when vocalized changes in words convey information. For example, mouse and mice: “ow” signifies one mouse; “eye” more than one. M-OW-SS; M-EYE-SS. The “em” and “ess” sounds stay the same. You are informed about the quantity of rodents by inflectional distinction. Apophony.

That is, I suppose, knowable, though it wasn’t to me. Haruspex, though—even if you’re a Classics major, a role player, and a fantasy nerd, you still might not be able to divine exactly what that word entrails.

No, I absolutely do not want to rethink the above line, thank you, spellcheck, go back to fussily redlining “nerf” please. I know you’re still mad at me about “wealthily,” too. Tough.

Yup, you guessed it. It’s a picture of a fake liver.

I mean, I hit all of those dork categories and go one step further, playing an augury-based magician in an old AOL MUD. You think I don’t know what haruspex means when my online character was summoning moonbeams before it was cool? Please.

If you didn’t spend your teen years scripting macros to improve your power perception as you walked between The Crossing and Haven, that’s your loss, I suppose. At least as far as unlocking half the reason why “apophonic as a haruspex” is so top-friggin’-notch.

Eh, I already taught you apophony. So if you don’t know haruspex, I hate to say it, but too bad. Class is over. Suffice it to say, haruspex is real, is strong, and is my friend.

(*At this point I will do my own time travel insertion—I typically do not read other reviews until mine are complete and posted. After finishing this one, I decided to google “apophenic as a haruspex,” to confirm I remembered the context correctly, and I should not have been surprised to find this phrase as inflection point for, well, every single person that has read the book.

I stand by my prior statement—if you already liked the book by the time you hit the apophony, it was fun idiosyncratic flair. If you didn’t, well, pretentious is as pretentious does. Ymmv.

[Double time travel pop-in: I cannot tell, on third editing, if juxtaposing linguistic terms with memetic terms comes through clearly or reads as random word salad. Lots of internet in-jokes are supposed to give you the same contextual nuance—if you understand them—as a dense vocab quiz on semantics might! No idea if it worked, but that was the intention.]

Now back to our regularly scheduled timeline.*(*))

These layered turns of phrase are not the reason why I liked Time War: my enjoyment can pretty easily be encapsulated in one excerpt:

If Blue were a scholar—and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be— she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.

Gotta reference Romeo and Juliet when the whole work is predicated on the eternal question, “What if someone mixed Romeo and Juliet with Spy Vs. Spy?” Answer: this book.

Two households, both alike in dignity, except this time fair Verona is the entire space-time continuum. Because they’re not just rival agents and star-crossed lovers, but interdimensional beings butterfly-effecting the timestream, unstitching each other’s work while needling their own intricate patterns.

Each chapter is its own reveal, its own heist-movie apex. And then it happens again, in the next chapter, but from the other side.

It is hard not to keep reading.