"Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down."
A 2019 novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
The novel is about two agents on rival sides of a time war, Red and Blue, who are both working to ensure that their respective futures — the highly technological Agency and the biological Garden — come to pass. Despite their opposing organizations, Red and Blue begin exchanging letters across time and space, and develop affection for each other that threatens not only them, but the entire time war.
Tropes present in this work:
- Alternate Timeline: There are thousands of them, called strands. A strand's past is called upthread, its future is downthread. Far downthread, all strands merge into one of two possible futures (also called Shifts), the Agency and the Garden. To ensure they come to pass, both Shifts send time travelers like Red and Blue to alter the course of each strand, working to "braid" them together so that they merge into their respective futures while unbraiding the attempts of other time travelers to do the same for the enemy.
- Animal Motifs: Birds play an important role to both protagonists.
- Biopunk: Blue's Garden is highly advanced Organic Technology with a corresponding degree of invasiveness.
- Boring, but Practical: Red thwarts Blue's plans of finding a specific doctor at a hospital by making the doctor's car engine fail, which makes her decide to work from home and see her nieces instead. Red also keeps the hospital from being full by making a bomb threat.
- Break His Heart to Save Him: Red and Blue try this in the end, with Red rejecting Blue so that she won't open her next letter, which will be deadly to her. Blue opens it anyway to save Red, and Red is forced to seek other measures.
- Butterfly of Doom: While they're not adverse to creating minor or major disasters, both Red and Blue prefer to change very small things to bend the timelines, like making sure someone is late or one person has a religious motivation.
- Color Motif: Red and Blue, obviously, named for the colors they prefer. Their true names are revealed to each other, but not the reader.
- Couldn't Find a Pen: Being time travelers with very high levels of technology, Red and Blue use some interesting methods to write and deliver their letters, ranging from marbling in the fat of a seal to the bubbles in a boiling test tube.
- Dating Catwoman: They are on rival sides of the war, after all.
- Epistolary Novel: The majority of the novella (with a few exceptions) is Red and Blue's letters to each other.
- Expendable Alternate Universe: Red and Blue have both retconned and re-retconned so many different timelines that they think nothing about killing people within them to serve a greater goal, since most of the time their involvement will just be erased anyway.
- Flesh Versus Steel: The time war is being fought between two potential futures, one high-tech and populated by digitized human minds, and the other filled with sufficiently advanced Organic Technology.
- Friendly Enemy: Red and Blue always respected each other, but as they exchange letters they become genuine friends, and then something more.
- Future Self Reveal: The Seeker that shows up at the end of most chapters is actually Red from the future.
- Mirror Match: Red actually fights her future self, the Seeker, at one point, with it technically ending in a draw (although obviously the Seeker runs away before Red realized who she was fighting).
- Motif: Go, an Chinese board game invented some two thousand years ago, which is mentioned in passing as resembling both the time war and the letters exchange between Red and Blue.
- Nature vs. Technology: In this world, there are only two possible futures: one is the Garden, a biological society filled with Organic Technology that prefers to move at nature's pace; the other is the Agency, an aloof, technological society that prefers mechanical efficiency. These two groups are locked in a Time War and send out agents that try and ensure their futures come to pass.
- Pen Pals: What Red and Blue end up becoming. Initially their exchange of letters begins as a way to taunt each other over foiling each other's plans, but they grow more personal as they tell each other more about themselves and begin finding common ground.
- Rogue Agent: The final letter reveals that Red and Blue have both gone rogue, and are now planning on remaking the timelines around each other to finally end the conflict.
- Shout-Out:
- Some of the nicknames Red and Blue use for each other reference songs and poems, such as Blue Da-Ba-Dee, or My Apple Tree, my Brightness.
- One letter, written while Red is harvesting lumber for Genghis Khan's armies, begins "How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?", a line from a Calvin and Hobbes comic.
- Suicide Mission: Red knows that her mission to save Blue will likely end in her death but she doesn't care.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: Despite being on opposite sides of the time war, agents Red and Blue fall in love with each other. They are explicitly compared to Romeo and Juliet in the text.
- Time Police: Two rival groups of them, Red's Agency (a technological utopia) and Blue's Garden (a biopunk one), constantly fighting each other over the various timelines to try and cut each other out of the universe.
- Time-Travel Romance: Red and Blue fall in love up and down thousands of timelines.
