This is the story of two agents fighting in a war, but not any war, a Time War between two factions, delivering taunts to each other in strange and hidden ways. I liked the sophisticated language related to the complexity of the War: strand, threads, braids, to travel “up thread” and “down thread”; because of course changing the past and the future, makes things messy. I liked that this is a time travel story where everyone didn’t turned to be the same person just in different time lines.
When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve know liens in a great machine’s heart, its hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart. Takes the new recruits a long time to get used to, once they’re decanted
Its not rare for time travel stories quickly turn very confusing and entangled; this one is straightforward, yet I have to say this is the most original time travel story I have read to date, no wonder it won the Best Novella 2020 Nebula Award. Definitely worth checking out.
Javier Aroche 