Max Gladstone

Sonya Hinduj's article brings up a fantastic honorable mention here that completely flips the script on what a fantasy wizard actually does

Oh, the craft sequence by Max Gladstone

Yes.

The series treats magic entirely differently than almost anything else on the market

You are not sucked in and making pictures in your head.

You are looking at the words on the page and experiencing it as craft of words interlocked and so you're thinking about the words that it's choosing you're thinking about the craft and the act of crafting and so it is easier to pay more attention to the craft whereas in an immersive novel if you are an author writing something that is designed to be I think Max Gladstone used the word streamlined for the type of prose where You stop experiencing it as prose.

It's just pictures in your head.

Good, streamlined prose invites you to stop paying attention to it.

We are starting with the shortest and honestly, easily the least conventional book on the entire list.

It's a 2019 novel called This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

And it clocks in at about 200 pages, which is-

Barely a blip.

We are gonna look at how time travel can be weaponized through something as delicate as the written word, and how small poetic constraints can yield the biggest emotional payoffs

This brings us to Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's 2019 novella, This Is How You Lose the Time War

A brilliant book

It is a breathtaking departure from the standard tropes we've been discussing.

In the best novella category, Amal El Mokhtar scooped first prize for The River Has Roots.

Listeners might know her from her 2020 Hugo winning novella, This Is How You Lose the Time War, which she co-authored with the American fantasy writer Max Gladstone.

The River Has Roots is El Mokhtar's standalone authorial debut, and it's about a human woman, Esther, whose life is upturned when she falls in love with a fairy from a neighbouring kingdom.

I mean...

Yeah, and so it's kind of like the first part of the book is, like, him training to kill this god, and then we go into...

He, like, leaves his mom behind, and there's this question of, like, is she a god, or is this just, like, an abusive mother? But it's beautifully written, and I think I'm constantly chasing the high of This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Mahla Matar.

I'm constantly chasing that high, and I feel like this is one of those books that I'm like, yeah.

Yeah.

When there are basically just two characters.

I finally read This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Um, I liked it.

It was good.