The Erotics of Collaboration / The Mysteries of Viral Phenomena
some reflections on This Is How You Lose the Time War
Dear Friends,
In the past (especially before I began teaching full-time), I worked some jobs related to marketing. Is this why I’ve always been interested when literature “goes viral”? I think, one part of this (at least for me), is that literature becoming viral phenomena feels extra special because in terms of media culture, reading is outlier. Every day there’s a new tweet, a new meme, a new song, a new video fighting for our attention. The moments when it’s a poem, a story, a novella, a book… that seems rarer.
In 2013, Patricia Lockwood went viral with her devastating “Rape Joke,” a poem which simultaneously deployed her unique brand of humor. Four years later, Kristen Roupenian’s wry “Cat Person” arguably exploded for similar reasons: honing in on some power imbalance between men and women in both romantic and sexual relationships. With “Cat Person,” there was certain an element of kairos: 2017 was the year of #MeToo, and Roupenian’s story went live just two months extra the allegations against Harvey Weinsten ruptured across media. As someone who has taught this story, many of my ‘Tinder generation’ women students have told me they felt seen by the razor-sharp recollection of bad sex and yellow-flag lovers.
Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones,” which touches upon candidly teaching your children about the shittiness of the world—and simultaneously the possibility of beauty—ebbs and flows in its popularity. Smith once said in an interview (paraphrasing here) that she knows something terrible must have happened in the world when she suddenly sees her social media notifications lighting up again.
As an ‘Elder Millennial,’ I have to admit I’m not as plugged in to BookTok, but I do know of a few instances of virality through TikTok. Stone Maidens—a book published through Amazon on their mystery imprint (Thomas & Mercer)—went basically unread for a decade until the author’s daughter made an account and her own video filming her father went viral. For most of us, we love the underdog story, and the tale of a hardworking, caring father hustling for his passion project on the side undoubtedly touched many. Side note: with the jacket copy touching upon some pretty outdated ‘Hollywood Native’/‘Savage Indian’ tropes, maybe there’s a reason it went unread for so long. 👀
Summer for me means a return to the gig economy, and beyond teaching, I thought I would experiment with trying to see if anyone might be interested in a local book group for the month of June where I’d work as a discussion facilitator. One of my selections was This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I thought it would be a great selection because (cue marketing brain): 1) I wanted to focus on queer speculative lit 2) It’s a novella, meaning it’s a relatively quick read, and 3) Oh yeah—it went viral around this time last year after someone with the moniker “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” tweeted to read the book.
I should probably point out that …Time War had already earned its laurels by May 2023. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula for the novella categories a few years prior. And while I do want to say I think there are some additional forces of the viral book recommendation at play, there is also more going on here than meets the eye.
If we try to reverse-engineer this virality, I would say part of this book recommendation hinges on the mystery. You (the potential reader) are explicitly being told not to look anything up about the book—to go in as ignorant as possible. There’s an excitement in the unknowing. So we already have intrigue built up. Secondly, in the era of instant gratification, we are being teased with the short length, and how reading this book is basically the equivalent of binging a new Netflix show. Thirdly, there is the element of the humorous and absurd: the recommendation is coming from a ridiculous, crass handle of a stan account for an anime (Trigun) that made it’s Western debut on Toonami 20 years ago.
Much of what I’ve been writing above has been highlighted elsewhere, so I’d like to try to offer up something somewhat novel. For a novella that has earned fame and praise, I would not exactly call This Is How You Lose the Time War ‘typical.’
In terms of genre, it’s blurring lines: it’s espionage (spy vs. spy), it’s a poet’s novel, it’s romance, it’s queer, and it falls in a lineage of the speculative subgenre of time travel. But there’s more to say about its atypicality:
For starters: it is an extremely lyrical book that can lean into the abstract at times. I’ve written about ‘invisible prose’ in a previous newsletter. I don’t think it’s too controversial to argue that hyper-stylized prose that calls attention to itself is generally found in literary fiction—not genre fiction. Genre fiction tends to forefront plot, which is carried forward by invisible prose (out of the belief that carrying the plot forward without the prose calling attention to itself is pivotal for storytelling).
Secondly, …Time War takes some formal risks: it moves between the epistolary mode (letter writing) and third-person narrative (exposition) in a rhythm. Very rarely does dialogue occur in-scene. Dialogue is something else I would claim is generally fairly important to genre fiction and guiding the reader through a text.
Even with character offerings, I would argue that the boundary between our two protagonists (Red and Blue) blurs often in terms of voice and perspective. They are both extremely competent spies and assassins—in addition to existing in a type of abstract immortality. Red is cyborgian, works for a blood-hued faction with a distinctly fascist, militaristic flavor. Blue is biological, plant-like, rhizomatic, working for an ecological hivemind that is as sensuous as it is cruel.
At first, their initial correspondences are terse, formal, with the sweetness of taunting one’s enemy. As time goes on, their epithets become playful and overly familiar. They name each other after fruits, HTML hex codes, dyes used in the fiber arts. Just like Dorothy leaving her tornado-spun house, she leaves a part of the colorless world behind to be seen in Technicolor.
What I find unique about this text is that the playful banter is just not happening on the character level: it’s happening as well on the writer level between El-Mohtar and Gladstone.
In her 1994 text, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes about the power of eros in education. While most of us would associate the erotic with carnal knowledge, hooks is distinctly using it in another context outside of the sexual. “Eros” in this instance refers to an embodied practice. She is arguing that students when students experience genuine joy and passion in the classroom—that is when and where the real learning takes place. When there is a deeper connection between two parties (in this case, the student and teacher), that is when self-actualization occurs.
Essentially, we cannot just exist in these spaces as floating, disembodied intellects. We are more than just our minds. It is the denial of curiosity and pleasure that stifles the educational environment. The idea that eroticism is a powerful force can be traced back to Audre Lorde via her essay on the “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” What hooks builds off of is Lorde’s idea that there is a possibility for a profound sense of fulfillment in eros. To embody the erotic is when one is deeply engaged, alive, and connected in the learning process.
So what does this have to do with …Time War? My argument is that by embodying both Red and Blue, the two authors engaged in an erotic collaboration/creative process. It is a shared dream, I would argue, of most creators: to felt seen. To feel admired. To possess a knowledge that your talent and efforts are appreciated. Those very qualities are alive on the page in this novella. You can feel these two writers trying to showboat, one-up, and impress each other as they engage back-and-forth with poetry on the page and play with the language in a way that only the written arts can offer us.
For me, the success of This is How You Lose the Time War is not its virality or its experiments—it’s that an erotic dialogue is embodied by two writers on the page via the correspondence of character. In the way that two writers fall in love with stringing words together, Red and Blue fall in love with each other with each passing love letter. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone have truly accomplished an embodied act of writing through eros in this novella.
As far as marketing goes, there are many folks who are paid big bucks in publishing to try to recreate some of the success that many of the aforementioned books have brought in as a boon to their imprint overlords. The truth is: like the fabric of time itself, it’s often an impossible thing to manipulate (at least in our side of the multiverse). It’s a mixture of right-place-right-time, of pathos, of shock value, of humor, of the rhetorical contract between writer and reader (oftentimes this relies on demographics; I would be remiss to fail to mention how much of BookTok is writing by white women for other white women)….
If anything, my own rhetorical question would be: how can we embody eros as a solo act? I mean… in the absence of a dialogue, how can we put that joy and passion and self-fulfillment into our own writing in a way where we dream our readers will feel seen—will feel like our books were written just for them? Or perhaps, the monologue is partially impossible because the dialogue is always there. If there is an eros behind virality, it lies in that contract between the writer who creates and the imagined reader who we hope will one day find meaning in our words. It is its own kind of strange love, carried across its own impossible strands of time and space.
Until next time,
JD