Trigun fan Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood propels 2019 sci-fi novel to top of Amazon charts

Gather round fellow nerds for the wholesome tale you’re looking for today. If you aren’t a person who spends all of their time in book and anime circles on Twitter, you may have missed this story. But you don’t want to miss this story.

Around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, May 7, a fan of the anime Trigun named Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood (a play on the Trigun character Nicholas D. Wolfwood) tweeted to the world about how much they enjoyed This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, a 2019 science fiction novel featuring a queer love story between two time travel agents from warring futures who fall in love through letters they leave for each other. Mr. Bigolas’ account tweets primarily about Trigun, but this book recommendation caught on like wildfire.

Trigun fan gives award-winning science fiction book big boost in sales

“read this,” Bigolas wrote. “DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it’s only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it’s only like four hours. do it right now i’m very extremely serious.”

The tweet went outrageously viral to the point where it helped propel This Is How You Lose The Time War to the very top of the Amazon bestseller charts. As of this writing, the novel is currently sitting at #3 on the Amazon charts; that’s not the science fiction charts. That’s all books on Amazon, across all genres. The only thing ahead of it at the moment is the picture book The Way Moms Are Worse Than You by Glenn Boozan (probably a common Mother’s Day buy), and the official guide for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the highly-anticipated Breath of the Wild sequel that comes out this weekend.

This sudden influx of attention for the novel has caught the attention of the authors, the publishing world, and news outlets like Slate, Kotaku, Gizmodo, Polygon, and Book Riot; even Yoshihiro Watanabe, producer of the 2023 Trigun reboot Trigun Stampede said he’d bought This Is How You Lose The Time War. It’s left author Amal El-Mohtar “speechless;” she’s been tweeting out responses as Time War has climbed the charts. The entire thread is very much worth a scroll if you want to get an idea of how the saga has progressed:

This is How You Lose the Time War climbs the Amazon charts

Seemingly still in a state of shock, El-Mohtar took to her blog. “I tried to title this post for twenty minutes and failed,” she wrote.

"As far as I can tell, someone going by the name Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood runs a fan account for a 90s anime called Trigun which was recently rebooted, and tweeted about loving Time War with imperative enthusiasm, and somehow over the course of 24 hours that tweet went viral with people chiming in to say how much, how passionately, how violently they love the book, and it blew up, and despite the fact that Twitter Does Not Sell Books enough people bought our book in a short enough period that whatever algorithmic alchemy determines Amazon’s best-sellers took notice, and the upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas."

Part of what makes all this so interesting is that This Is How You Lose The Time War is not a new book; it was first released in 2019, and while it was incredibly well received and won numerous awards including the Hugo and Nebula, it’s still incredibly rare to see a genre book from several years ago top charts like this without news of an adaptation or a sequel or something. As it turns out, the support of Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood might count for just as much.

The book’s success is also a testament to the power of fandoms. Both the book/publishing community and the Trigun fan community have large presences on Twitter, and the cross pollination of these two groups has been a huge part of what’s made this story so fun to watch unfold. El-Mohtar and Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood are both shocked; neither could have predicted this outcome. It’s led to more awareness for not only This Is How You Lose The Time War but also the Trigun manga and anime series, which is a major win for fans of each (or increasingly, fans of both).

“Fandom is powerful mostly because of collective enthusiasm,” Mr. Bigolas told io9’s Linda Codega in a wonderfully earnest interview. “It can be a very dangerous but also very fun thing, depending on how you use it. I think the energy that’s created when tons of likeminded people meet up is incredible!”

The paperback edition of This Is How You Lose The Time War is currently on sale on Amazon. Trigun Stampede is available on Hulu and Crunchyroll. Enjoy your day and may you find some stories that excite you as much as these have excited Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood.

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