Letters Serve To Bond Time-Traveling Rivals In 'This Is How You Lose The Time War'
Rather than the time travel or war, the thrill of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's book becomes the connection between two lonely professional killers with the ability to inscribe letters on lava.
The problem with time-travel stories is the haywire factor: Their tendency (almost guaranteed) to, at some point, just go completely off the rails.
See, there's an in-built suicide switch in a time-travel story that's endemic to the form. Because once you start messing with timelines and alternate, competing realities, you're decoupling effect from cause, removing consequence from action. And once you do that, narrative structure, like a doughnut in hot coffee, just falls all to pieces.
The epistolary novel, too, has a genetic defect that often (read: nearly always) cripples it. Like one of those shaky little
