She picks up a letter from her Garden adversary Blue a mocking taunt to an opponent, to which, in a sense that this is a tournament and a tease, she replies in the same vein.Īnd thus begins another always-fascinating scenario, the battle between two opponents in a war who come to find a kindred-spirit in the enemy: the secret-agents who find in the to-and-fro of the “game” a personal satisfaction more attractive than ideological commitment. Following a cataclysmic battle, the Agency operative, Red, savours her victory, and finds ambiguity in it. Here, we have two agents in a battle fought throughout tangled braids of human alternate-history/parallel-worlds between the Agency and the Garden: whose characteristics-material, technological, militaristic versus organic, insidious, ruthless-become part of the conflict. In El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s short but emotionally-packed novel we get something similar to Leiber, in which the Change War is fought by two forces, the “Spiders” and the “Snakes” who never quite reach the dynamic of “good guys” versus “bad guys”. There’s something fascinating about the “Time War” scenario which we find in, for instance, Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time and the stories from the 50s and 60s published as The Change War, or Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time. This review first appeared in The BSFA Review.
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