I use the term loosely to refer to works which deploy defamiliarizing writing techniques at the sentence and structural level-nonlinear narratives, varied approaches to subject, stylistic diction-and draw attention to the language itself, particularly in ways that strike the genre reader as “mainstream” or “highbrow”. Obviously, “literariness” is not something new to genre speculative fiction, but there is a sense in which it has not been itself a widely celebrated quality within genre circles. It needs no defending, but that claim-that this novella is doing something unusual for genre-is a good place to begin a cursory investigation of what makes it so extraordinary.
I was fortunate to read it with a few different book clubs, and was intrigued by the genteel critique of being “too literary” that a few different readers put forth. Patterns, Guts: Style & Substance in This Is How You Lose The Time WarĪmal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War took home major genre awards, and developed an unusually intense fanbase for a standalone novella.
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