This Is How You Lose the Time War
This book is about two time-traveling superagents that initially try to kill each other but fall in love and rail against the system (?). The question mark is because the majority of the book consists of love letters that ooze with such angsty-edgy-teenager energy that the plot never sat with me long enough to grasp. The two superagents are female, so I do appreciate the gay scifi angle. However, that does not absolve the authors of the continuous barrage of “romance” that ranged from very basic to absurdly childish, while simultaneously having zero emotional resonance. Not a mean feat, this.
I guess it was also wrong to expect this book to deliver a believable time travel story, a genre that I consider to be the literary equivalent of communism: sounds very cool, but never executed without morphing into a dreadful monster. There were occasional hints of brilliance, like the idea of future AI and biological civilizations weaving together past timelines to lead to their own, but these were never explored beyond surface level and just got buried by meters of inane posturing.
The fact that this book has two authors is also more of a gimmick than a feature. Their writing styles were not distinct enough to bring real personalities to the characters, but also not seamless enough to avoid a sense of incongruity. Again, cool idea, poorly executed.