Community and Chrononormativity in Queer Speculative Fiction
There is an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End as well as Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s 2019 novel This Is How You Lose the Time War are examples where two are better than one. While the former presents a story of two teen boys living their last day together and the latter presents two women time travelers on opposite sides of a years-long war, both are stories in which characters find community within each other. Community can commonly be defined in one of two ways: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common, or a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing attitudes, interests, and goals. People normally think of a community as large and encompassing, but these stories show that it can come in different forms.
In They Both Die at the End, the main characters, Mateo and Rufus, live very different lives before they meet each other. At first, Mateo is cautious and reserved, only being very close with two people, his father and best friend, Lidia. On the other hand, Rufus is more daring and willing to take risks, tight-knit with a group he calls “The Plutos”, living in a foster home. This is shown plainly by the difference in their situations when receiving the Death-Cast call. Mateo is at his apartment alone reading a blog on his laptop, while Rufus is out with his friends Tagoe and Malcolm beating up his ex’s new boyfriend. Mateo reflects on his call, thinking, “The list of people I’ll miss…is so short I shouldn’t even call it a list: there’s Dad…my best friend Lidia…And that’s it” (Silvera 12). Contrast this with Rufus, who is close with the people in his foster home and asks to have a funeral after he receives his call. “You guys gotta do me the biggest favor. Wake up Jenn Lori and Francis. Tell them I wanna have a funeral before heading out” (Silvera 30). Despite the fact Rufus’s community is larger in the beginning, both his and Mateo’s offer support to one another, thus fulfilling the notion that a community can mean finding fellowship with one another.
Having a community can also mean having strength, having courage, and being brave. There is nowhere that is more apparent in showcasing that than with Mateo’s growth after meeting Rufus. He learns to be adventurous and have more fun as being with Rufus brings out another side of him. Rufus offers for him to ride on the back of his bike and while initially he refuses, the next time, he vows to be brave. “This bike isn’t the worst thing…It’s freeing…When we reach our destination I’m going to do something small and brave” (Silvera 157). When they reach their destination, Althea Park, he jumps off the bike. It may be a small action, but as Rufus points out, “he’s…always want[ed] to do something exciting, just [was] too scared to go out and do it” (Silvera 158). This is an achievement for Mateo who has lived his life thus far paranoid of the things that could happen instead of living in the moment. Even something as small as jumping off the back of a bike is exciting. After this, he makes more adventurous choices, doing the “Rainforest Jump!” at the Travel Arena and singing in front of the crowd at a club called “Clint’s Graveyard” (Silvera 180 & 192). His development shows the importance of having a community, no matter who’s a part of it.
Finding a community can be like finding a home as well. Near the end of the novel, Mateo invites Rufus back to his apartment and Rufus says, “Take me home, Mateo” (Silvera 211). It is as if by this statement Mateo’s home—which is seen as his safe space—is just as much his as it is Rufus’s. In his chapter in the book Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature, entitled “Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End, Familial Disruption, and the Space of the Home”, author Angel Daniel Matos makes a similar observation, saying, “...We must acknowledge that it is Rufus’s presence in the home, and not the home itself, that emanates this sense of safety” (191). This fits into the concept that home is not always a place and that people can find home within each other. Mateo and Rufus fell in love in a day, finding themselves along the way and establishing a sense of belonging with one another.
In This is How You Lose the Time War, the circumstances are vastly different, but the main characters, Red and Blue, still find one another, redefining what it means to have love transcend all. Despite being soldiers fighting on opposite sides, Red for the Agency, and Blue for Garden, they communicate in secret with coded letters. Manifesting in different ways, these letters start off in a sort of snarky manner with lines like, “I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards…” and “Remembering our last encounter, I thought it best to ensure you’d twist no other groundlings to your purpose, hence the bomb threat” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 10 & 14), but, eventually, as their letters back and forth continue, unforeseen feelings develop. “I stand at cliff’s edge, and—hell. I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I?” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 87). Blue reciprocates these feelings, professing, “Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 94). With these letters, they inspire each other to keep going with their language, becoming each other’s reason to continue. They think they’re being inconspicuous, but soon enough, the Agency as well as Garden catch onto their relationship. Red expresses contempt for them. “Garden, panicked, slithers shoots upthread to catch her, chase her, kill her; Commandant, feeling this, sends her own agents in pursuit. Fuck them” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 111). Blue expresses a similar sentiment with this harrowing ending statement to the novel, “I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But, maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win” (El Mohtar and Gladstone 130). Even with all odds against them, they choose each other, going against the very systems that birthed them. Together, they resist.
Both of these novels present narratives of the enduring nature of love and community no matter how much time one may have. As Wendy Gay Pearson puts it in her article, “Speculative Fiction and Queer Theory”, “queer speculative fiction…speaks to…issues of queer time and the ability to critique chrononormativity (the normative sense of time across the life span) to subvert assumptions about linear time and “normal” life.” They Both Die at the End gives readers a glimpse into a world in which one knows the day they’re going to die, making them think about the impermanence of life, while This is How You Lose the Time War goes in the opposite direction, creating a world in which time travel is possible and people can change how the world looks by moving a single mug to a different spot than it was in the original timeline, but achieves the same questioning by the reader. With their different approaches to critiquing chrononormativity, both novels do a fantastic job of creating characters that challenge the readers’ assumptions about what it means to be human and how to live their lives.
In the end, these stories show how valuable spending time with loved ones is. The current reality doesn’t let people know when they are going to die nor does it have time travel to try and prevent that death from occurring. But, life is not meant to be lived worrying about the future or the past. Life is meant to be enjoyed in the present and to the fullest, surrounded by good company.
Works Cited
El-Mohtar, Amal., & Gladstone, Max. (2019). This is How You Lose the Time War. Simon and Schuster.
Matos, Angel. Daniel. (2023). Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature. In Routledge eBooks (pp. 183–194). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003269663-18
Pearson, Wendy. Gay. (2022). Speculative Fiction and Queer Theory. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1214
Silvera, Adam. (2017). They Both Die at the End. Simon and Schuster.
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