Time Wars is for anyone who has ever wondered why, in a culture so obsessed with efficiency, we seem to have so little time we can call our own. A courageous, thought-provoking challenge to conventional wisdom.

* HUGO AWARD WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * “[An] exquisitely crafted tale...Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay...This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future. Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right? Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

"When is wartime? In common usage, it is a period of time in which a society is at war. But we now live in what President Obama has called 'an age without surrender ceremonies,' where the war on terror remains open-ended and presidents announce an end to conflict in Iraq, even as conflict on the ground persists. It is no longer easy to distinguish between wartime and peacetime. In this inventive meditation on war, time, and the law, Mary L. Dudziak argues that wartime is not a discrete or easily defined period of time. Indeed, America has been engaged in some form of ongoing overseas armed conflict for over a century. Yet policy makers and the American public continue to view wars as exceptional events that eventually give way to normal peace times--a conception that Dudziak believes has two significant consequences. First, because war is thought to be exceptional, 'wartime' remains a shorthand argument justifying extreme actions like torture and detention without trial. Second, ongoing warfare is enabled by the inattention of the American people. More disconnected than ever from the wars their nation is fighting, public disengagement leaves us without political restraints on the exercise of American war powers. Articulately exposing the disconnect between the way we imaging wartime and the practice of American wars, Dudziak illuminates the way the changing nature of American warfare undermines democratic accountability, yet makes democratic engagement all the more necessary."--Dust jacket.

"Walton first uses his magnifying glass to capture images of struggle in a California valley during a century and a half of transformation, then inverts it to scrutinize the American state, popular politics, and collective action in general. The maneuver is bold, the outcome stimulating."—Charles Tilly, New School for Social Research "A passionate and first rate historical adventure. The plot is as intricate, fascinating, and full of intrigue and detail as a Dickens or a Tolstoy novel."—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

The Time Wars series is being reissued for the first time in a new, larger, higher quality edition to address reader concerns about prior editions, as well as numerous requests to have the books available on Kindle. In the 27th Century, international disputes are resolved through time travel, "clocking" soldiers from the future into conflicts of the past. It seemed like an elegant idea: wartime industries drove the economy without actually putting nations through the physical ravages of war. And since the past already happened, history could not be changed. So went the theory. What could possibly go wrong? Lucas Priest found out the hard way. Enlisting in the U.S. Army Temporal Corps seemed like an adventure compared to his boring corporate job, but after marching with the Roman legions against Hannibal, fighting Custer's 7th Cavalry with Crazy Horse, and raiding with Attila's savage Huns, he could have used a little boredom. And it was about to get much worse. History, it turned out, could be changed, and a plot to kidnap and impersonate King Richard the Lion-hearted was discovered barely in the nick of time. But could it be stopped before a madman changed the course of history? Two elite commando teams had tried and failed in their attempts. Now Priest was drafted to take part in a third. The team was tasked to infiltrate the past with impersonations of their own to prevent a timestream split. But it would be hard enough passing themselves off as Sir Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and Little John without having to assassinate a king....