What do you think?
Rate this book
Change War
The Big Time
Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to recall exactly the same past from one day to the next? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, then you've had hints of the Change War.
It's been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides--"Spiders" and "Snakes"--battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors.
It's been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides--"Spiders" and "Snakes"--battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
About the author
Fritz Leiber
1,145 books956 followersFritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser; he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces--The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation.
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 450 reviews
September 11, 2019
Hugo Award winner The Big Time (1958) is not only an enjoyable and memorable novel, but a disturbing one too. It was born, in part, from Fritz Leiber’s conception of time travel and the nature of the past. He did not believe at all in “The Butterfly Effect”; no, he believed that the past was more determined, more resilient. If you really wanted to change the future, Lieber thought, you would have to go back...again, and again, and again.
During “The Change War”, two groups of fighters—directed by shadowy leaders known as the “Spiders” (the West) and the “Snakes” (the East)—fight battles and conduct clandestine operations, both in the future in the past, in order to alter history in their favor. Our novel takes place in a Recuperation Station, where our narrator Greta works as an “entertainer”--sort of a sex worker/nurse/PTSD therapist—whose job is to get the traumatized soldiers back in shape and ready to return to the front.
It reminded me at first of a WW I play (soldiers on leave, amiably feuding, surrounded by mademoiselles), plus a typical Hollywood WW II movie (a tense situation that demands unity, with every possible ethnic group of G.I. represented). Except, in this case, the soldiers range from WWII G.I., Nazi commandant, and WWI British Tommy to a Roman Centurian, a Lunan in octopoid form, and an Amazon from ancient Crete. But, just as everybody seems to be having a good time, somebody sets the suitcase nuke a-ticking, and the Recuperation Station crew must solve their own locked room mystery to survive.
This is a surprising, inventive novel, full with sharp, witty dialogue packed with multilingual puns and literary allusions. But it has a serious side too. As we learn of the many changes the “Change War” has wrought on time—including a centuries long Nazi takeover of America and the destruction of the works of Plato—we began to sense the great waste and even greater damage the Spiders and Snakes have wrought.
As Bruce, the WWI Tommy, puts it:
Have you ever asked yourself how many operations the fabric of history can stand before its all stitches, whether too much Change won’t one day wear out the past. And the present and the future too, the whole bleeding business...Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you have stripped off the paint?Sure, what Bruce says has a particular meaning about the “The Change War.” But it also has something tell us about any kind other kind of war too.
February 9, 2017
1958 Hugo winner, and what an interesting surprise!
This is the Cure for the Common (modern) SF. Tired of the old rehashing of drawn-out plots and over-deep character explorations full of pathos, pathos, and more pathos? Then pick this one up. See the universes without being a Space Opera, enjoy the perks of touching all time without a time lord in sight. Drink your favorite alcohol and listen to your neighbor wax poetic. And oh yeah, don't get caught in the war across all Time. (The title of the book is kinda crappy. It's actually referring to the field of battle.)
So, this novel is about as far as you can get from modern SF.
It's laden heavily with a ton of interesting ideas and alternate reality sets and times thrown at you without explanation or depth, having a very quick progression of plot and and a stage as big as all time and all the spaces of an infinity of universes.
If that doesn't blow your mind, then good.
We're hanging out with the entertainment crew that services the space-time warriors that snipe big changes through history, a neutral zone that caters to the Snakes (one time-traveling faction) and the Spiders (another time traveling faction.) It's chaos, to say the least. Is it war, or is it really something else? No spoilers.
There's plenty to think about, of course. Wanna invert a huge pulsating brain or name drop the Comandant of Toronto or murder baby Einstein? It's fun as hell.
I got the impression that Heinlein's "All You Zombies" was a better Time Travel story, with more and deeper exploration of plot and character, but I'm also pretty sure that the two authors were playing with each other. Heinlein's story came out one year after this one won its Hugo. Fun fact: the 2014 movie Predestination was based on "All You Zombies".
BUT, Leiber's novel was NOT about going deep, but going really, really wide in an attempt to tackle a really big idea. What idea? Oh no. This is an easy and quick book, people. Enjoy it for yourself. :)
We zip here and there and everywhere, like a knee-jerk reaction to all the Golden-Age SF that had just come before. But Leiber takes all the old square-jawed heroes with all their can-do attitudes and amped them up to mind-blowing proportions, giving them an unlimited landscape, and then, for our "heroes" we're thrown into the minds of "normals" caught in the middle of it all.
Why is this the opposite of modern SF? Because it doesn't slow down to explore any single plotline or character in detail. So much happens so quickly that it's a delight and a blur and I feel like I need to sit down and deconstruct the living hell out of every paragraph and chortle at the wordplay and the thousands of alternate reality implications. There's SO MANY. :) It's like falling into Wonka's candy store.
Zip, zip, zip, zip. It kept a smile on my face and a snicker in my laugh for practically the entire novel. Even the late reveals reverse the fact that endless (literally) war is not quite as dark as we first thought. That immediately turns this novel into a comedy by the old traditions, and I feel like I've been needing something very light-hearted for a while, so this definitely fits the bill.
If you're getting the deep desire to have an idea-packed and an amazingly quick read, I'd absolutely recommend this novel. Fritz Leiber has such a light and clever voice! :)
This is the Cure for the Common (modern) SF. Tired of the old rehashing of drawn-out plots and over-deep character explorations full of pathos, pathos, and more pathos? Then pick this one up. See the universes without being a Space Opera, enjoy the perks of touching all time without a time lord in sight. Drink your favorite alcohol and listen to your neighbor wax poetic. And oh yeah, don't get caught in the war across all Time. (The title of the book is kinda crappy. It's actually referring to the field of battle.)
So, this novel is about as far as you can get from modern SF.
It's laden heavily with a ton of interesting ideas and alternate reality sets and times thrown at you without explanation or depth, having a very quick progression of plot and and a stage as big as all time and all the spaces of an infinity of universes.
If that doesn't blow your mind, then good.
We're hanging out with the entertainment crew that services the space-time warriors that snipe big changes through history, a neutral zone that caters to the Snakes (one time-traveling faction) and the Spiders (another time traveling faction.) It's chaos, to say the least. Is it war, or is it really something else? No spoilers.
There's plenty to think about, of course. Wanna invert a huge pulsating brain or name drop the Comandant of Toronto or murder baby Einstein? It's fun as hell.
I got the impression that Heinlein's "All You Zombies" was a better Time Travel story, with more and deeper exploration of plot and character, but I'm also pretty sure that the two authors were playing with each other. Heinlein's story came out one year after this one won its Hugo. Fun fact: the 2014 movie Predestination was based on "All You Zombies".
BUT, Leiber's novel was NOT about going deep, but going really, really wide in an attempt to tackle a really big idea. What idea? Oh no. This is an easy and quick book, people. Enjoy it for yourself. :)
We zip here and there and everywhere, like a knee-jerk reaction to all the Golden-Age SF that had just come before. But Leiber takes all the old square-jawed heroes with all their can-do attitudes and amped them up to mind-blowing proportions, giving them an unlimited landscape, and then, for our "heroes" we're thrown into the minds of "normals" caught in the middle of it all.
Why is this the opposite of modern SF? Because it doesn't slow down to explore any single plotline or character in detail. So much happens so quickly that it's a delight and a blur and I feel like I need to sit down and deconstruct the living hell out of every paragraph and chortle at the wordplay and the thousands of alternate reality implications. There's SO MANY. :) It's like falling into Wonka's candy store.
Zip, zip, zip, zip. It kept a smile on my face and a snicker in my laugh for practically the entire novel. Even the late reveals reverse the fact that endless (literally) war is not quite as dark as we first thought. That immediately turns this novel into a comedy by the old traditions, and I feel like I've been needing something very light-hearted for a while, so this definitely fits the bill.
If you're getting the deep desire to have an idea-packed and an amazingly quick read, I'd absolutely recommend this novel. Fritz Leiber has such a light and clever voice! :)
December 10, 2016
“I don’t like spiders or snakes”
So sang country – western star Jim Stafford in his 1974 hit single. Sixteen years earlier, SFWA and Fantasy Grandmaster Fritz Leiber released his wildly fantastic time travel, extra dimensional, Hugo Award winning short novel about – spiders and snakes.
These spiders and snakes, though, turn out to be two groups of billion-year-old time travel antagonists who are fighting a vast war to make subtle changes along parallel time tracks. Leiber describes a recreational hospice that caters to injured time soldiers needing some R&R. Leiber conjures up a BIG TIME of fun with characters from far ends of the time spectrum and plenty of anachronistic frivolity.
Harry Turtledove must keep a copy of this on his desk, this seems like the template for alternate history time stories. Poul Anderson would borrow some themes in his 1965 SF novel The Corridors of Time.
Peter Gabriel’s hit tune “Big Time” from 1986 really has nothing to do with Fritz Leiber or time travel, but the title made me think of it and I sang along while I read.
A must read for classic SF/F fans.
So sang country – western star Jim Stafford in his 1974 hit single. Sixteen years earlier, SFWA and Fantasy Grandmaster Fritz Leiber released his wildly fantastic time travel, extra dimensional, Hugo Award winning short novel about – spiders and snakes.
These spiders and snakes, though, turn out to be two groups of billion-year-old time travel antagonists who are fighting a vast war to make subtle changes along parallel time tracks. Leiber describes a recreational hospice that caters to injured time soldiers needing some R&R. Leiber conjures up a BIG TIME of fun with characters from far ends of the time spectrum and plenty of anachronistic frivolity.
Harry Turtledove must keep a copy of this on his desk, this seems like the template for alternate history time stories. Poul Anderson would borrow some themes in his 1965 SF novel The Corridors of Time.
Peter Gabriel’s hit tune “Big Time” from 1986 really has nothing to do with Fritz Leiber or time travel, but the title made me think of it and I sang along while I read.
A must read for classic SF/F fans.
November 18, 2016
In spite of being the Hugo Award winner for 1958 The Big Time is a fairly obscure title. Before proceeding with the review I can give you four reasons to read it:
1. It won a Hugo (not that all Hugo winners are good, IMO)
2. It is free to read in the public domain (e-book link / audiobook link)
3. The audio book is read by Karen Savage, surely savage by name only, she has such a pretty voice.
4. Fritz Leiber is a well-respected author from sci-fi’s Golden Age
The very pulpy and lurid book cover of the above 35 Cents edition belies the true nature of the book. The Big Time is not an action-packed sci-fi adventure with lots of alien liquefactions. The entire novel takes place in a single locale over a single day (or several hours). The setting is called “The Place”, a recuperation station for soldiers of “The Change War”, a war between two factions of time travelers who want to make changes to history for their own ends.
“But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods we use in our wonderful Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra. Kidnapping Einstein when he's a baby.”
“The Place” is where wounded soldiers go to be treated for physical and psychological injuries. It is staffed by medical officers and “Entertainers”. An Entertainer is a woman who functions as a nurse, a therapist, and even a prostitute. The two factions are called The Spiders and The Snakes, our “heroes” work for the Spiders, though this does not mean that they are the good guys in this war. The book’s title “The Big Time” is slang for participation in the Change War. All the participants are plucked from various points in history from their timelines just prior to their moments of death. They are given the choice of joining in the war effort or proceed to their scheduled demise, not many people select the second option.
The story takes place within a single day (in so far as a day is a valid concept in a place outside of time). The half of the book introduces the myriad concepts and terms of The Big Time, and the wounded soldiers narrating the story of their lives (in monologs) and discussing the philosophy and morals of The Change War. The narrator of the book is an Entertainer called Greta Forzane, “twenty-nine and a party girl”. The second half of the book concerns the discovery of a time bomb (as in a “ticking time bomb”), and the characters’ struggles to defuse it and find the culprits.
A more representative cover, I think.
The Big Time is an interesting read that will probably appeal more to regular sci-fi readers than those who are new to the genre. It is more a story of ideas than that of action; partly an allegory for the meaninglessness of war from the participants’ viewpoint. The Big Time people do not know whether they are working on the “right” side. They are only committed to whichever side recruited them. There are several fun sci-fi concepts such as the Maintainer device that keeps “The Place” running outside the cosmos, the Inverter that turns things inside out or transforms them into their mirror image. Given the short length of the book, Fritz Leiber did not have room for much character development and I did not feel like I know them very well.
Still, I recommend the book with some reservations for the four reasons mentioned at the beginning of this review.
Note
Karen savage is one of the best readers on Librivox. However, her voice is not suited to one of the main characters who is a Nazi officer. Her rendition of the German accent does not quite work for me, her voice just sounds too sweet for that character. Not one of her best works but still a pleasure to listen to. Her Jane Austen narrations are wonderful, and I highly recommend those.
Quotes
“you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.”
“Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change won't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've stripped off the paint.”
"I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into his eyes. "When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 ten minutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkard grabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was also seizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace. But what did I find the Spiders wanted me for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them crueler and stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big Change, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos."
“I know the Spiders promise it, but even if they do go back and cut another Doubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?" He slapped his chest with his bare hand. "I don't think so. And even if he is me, with unbroken consciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight more wars and face more Change Death for the sake of an almighty power—”
“Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but that's different and it's not made for real living.”
1. It won a Hugo (not that all Hugo winners are good, IMO)
2. It is free to read in the public domain (e-book link / audiobook link)
3. The audio book is read by Karen Savage, surely savage by name only, she has such a pretty voice.
4. Fritz Leiber is a well-respected author from sci-fi’s Golden Age
The very pulpy and lurid book cover of the above 35 Cents edition belies the true nature of the book. The Big Time is not an action-packed sci-fi adventure with lots of alien liquefactions. The entire novel takes place in a single locale over a single day (or several hours). The setting is called “The Place”, a recuperation station for soldiers of “The Change War”, a war between two factions of time travelers who want to make changes to history for their own ends.
“But if you want variety, give a thought to the rotten methods we use in our wonderful Change War. Poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra. Kidnapping Einstein when he's a baby.”
“The Place” is where wounded soldiers go to be treated for physical and psychological injuries. It is staffed by medical officers and “Entertainers”. An Entertainer is a woman who functions as a nurse, a therapist, and even a prostitute. The two factions are called The Spiders and The Snakes, our “heroes” work for the Spiders, though this does not mean that they are the good guys in this war. The book’s title “The Big Time” is slang for participation in the Change War. All the participants are plucked from various points in history from their timelines just prior to their moments of death. They are given the choice of joining in the war effort or proceed to their scheduled demise, not many people select the second option.
The story takes place within a single day (in so far as a day is a valid concept in a place outside of time). The half of the book introduces the myriad concepts and terms of The Big Time, and the wounded soldiers narrating the story of their lives (in monologs) and discussing the philosophy and morals of The Change War. The narrator of the book is an Entertainer called Greta Forzane, “twenty-nine and a party girl”. The second half of the book concerns the discovery of a time bomb (as in a “ticking time bomb”), and the characters’ struggles to defuse it and find the culprits.
A more representative cover, I think.
The Big Time is an interesting read that will probably appeal more to regular sci-fi readers than those who are new to the genre. It is more a story of ideas than that of action; partly an allegory for the meaninglessness of war from the participants’ viewpoint. The Big Time people do not know whether they are working on the “right” side. They are only committed to whichever side recruited them. There are several fun sci-fi concepts such as the Maintainer device that keeps “The Place” running outside the cosmos, the Inverter that turns things inside out or transforms them into their mirror image. Given the short length of the book, Fritz Leiber did not have room for much character development and I did not feel like I know them very well.
Still, I recommend the book with some reservations for the four reasons mentioned at the beginning of this review.
Note
Karen savage is one of the best readers on Librivox. However, her voice is not suited to one of the main characters who is a Nazi officer. Her rendition of the German accent does not quite work for me, her voice just sounds too sweet for that character. Not one of her best works but still a pleasure to listen to. Her Jane Austen narrations are wonderful, and I highly recommend those.
Quotes
“you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.”
“Have you ever asked yourselves how many operations the fabric of history can stand before it's all stitches, whether too much Change won't one day wear out the past? And the present and the future, too, the whole bleeding business. Is the law of the Conservation of Reality any more than a thin hope given a long name, a prayer of theoreticians? Every operation leaves reality a bit cruder, a bit uglier, a bit more makeshift, and a whole lot less rich in those details and feelings that are our heritage, like the crude penciled sketch on canvas when you've stripped off the paint.”
"I accepted Resurrection all right," Bruce said, a glare coming into his eyes. "When they pulled me out of my line at Passchendaele in '17 ten minutes before I died, I grabbed at the offer of life like a drunkard grabs at a drink the morning after. But even then I thought I was also seizing a chance to undo historic wrongs, work for peace. But what did I find the Spiders wanted me for? Only to fight more wars, over and over again, make them crueler and stinkinger, cut the swath of death a little wider with each Big Change, work our way a little closer to the death of the cosmos."
“I know the Spiders promise it, but even if they do go back and cut another Doubleganger from my lifeline, is he me?" He slapped his chest with his bare hand. "I don't think so. And even if he is me, with unbroken consciousness, why's he been Resurrected again? Just to refight more wars and face more Change Death for the sake of an almighty power—”
“Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos? The Places have their own nows, the now of the Big Time we're on, but that's different and it's not made for real living.”
February 11, 2021
On my reread list -- fond memories from my last read, decades ago. Here's an online copy, from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/32256
And Neil Gaiman's perceptive review, the best I saw online:
http://sciencefiction.loa.org/appreci...
"The Big Time is a remarkably sophisticated story, unusual for science fiction of its time period. It is Leiber's most successful science fiction novel: it contains many of Leiber's pet themes—Shakespeare and the theater, alternate identities, alcoholism and sadomasochism, Germany and Time. It's funny, smart, and resonant, playing out huge themes on a tiny stage, and it demands a great deal of its readers, so it's no surprise that it was rewarded with the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958."
If you've never read it (or it's been awhile), well, you should. And I love, love, LOVE the cover of my ancient pb!
And Neil Gaiman's perceptive review, the best I saw online:
http://sciencefiction.loa.org/appreci...
"The Big Time is a remarkably sophisticated story, unusual for science fiction of its time period. It is Leiber's most successful science fiction novel: it contains many of Leiber's pet themes—Shakespeare and the theater, alternate identities, alcoholism and sadomasochism, Germany and Time. It's funny, smart, and resonant, playing out huge themes on a tiny stage, and it demands a great deal of its readers, so it's no surprise that it was rewarded with the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958."
If you've never read it (or it's been awhile), well, you should. And I love, love, LOVE the cover of my ancient pb!
June 8, 2013
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber
Published 1958 in Galaxy Magazine, novel 1961. (Edition Read: Ace Books, (1961), 130 pages)
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958.
Review by Mark Yon
This is one of those reviews I occasionally do about older books, perhaps a little forgotten.
It came about because I was thinking the other day about past Hugo winners, following a discussion over at SFFWorld about the 2013 nominees. That gave way to my remembering that, in my teens, there was a time when I ambitiously tried to read as many Hugo Award winning novels as I could. It was a venture that was rather doomed to failure – they weren’t easily available to a poor lad in a small town in Northern England in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, and so after a lot of the obvious ones (Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land ) I went on to read other things.
But The Big Time was one that I didn’t read beyond the first few pages. I remember looking at my Dune and my Stranger in a Strange Land, both hefty novels, and thinking “How could a book of little more than 100 pages be worthy of a Hugo?” And then I dismissed it, even though I liked a lot of Leiber’s other novels and stories.
Winner of the fourth Hugo Best Novel in 1958, today it is often seen as a bit of a surprise winner.*
In the years since 1958, The Big Time has become one of those books that, alongside Mark Clifton’s winning novel They’d Rather Be Right in 1955, has been questioned as a worthy winner, or at best regarded as ‘just’ a minor winner. Jo Walton at Tor.com has said that other novels that could’ve been worthy of inclusion (and for comparison here) are “Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Jack Vance’s Big Planet, Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets and Eye in the Sky, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, Robert Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer and Citizen of the Galaxy, Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, Van Vogt’s The Empire of the Atom, Philip Jose Farmer’s The Green Odyssey, Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Frederic Brown’s Rogue in Space, and Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp.” Many of these I’ve read, and they remain fond favourites. Is The Big Time really better than those?
Looking around, the opinions about The Big Time seem to polarise. The aforementioned Jo Walton said that she likes The Big Time, but “although it’s in print I don’t hear it talked about much”. Alternatively, Sam Jordison at the Guardian UK newspaper stated when he read it, ‘The best thing that can be said about it is that it's mercifully short.’ However, it was selected for inclusion in the Library of America's two-volume compilation American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and therefore perhaps should be seen as important.
With such differentiated opinions, I felt it was clearly time for a revisit. And I’m pleased I did.
The basic idea of the novel has become a bit of a cliché these days – there is a time war, the Change War, between two alien factions, named ‘The Spiders’ and ‘The Snakes’. Both sides travel across space and time, trying to alter the past and the future to their own needs, and have agents doing their work for them. The story takes place at the Place, a ‘Recuperation Station’, where ‘Entertainer’ Greta Forzane is one of a team who provides rest and relaxation for battle-weary soldiers. Told from Greta’s perspective, the narrative is rather small and focussed, a story of what crime readers would call ‘a locked room mystery’.
When a mission going through the Recuperation Station goes wrong, Greta and her colleagues find themselves with three Hussar soldiers and an atomic bomb, originally on the way to save Rome. Whilst discussing what to do and catching up with the latest events from the War, the whole Place becomes Introverted - isolated from space and time with the loss of its Major Maintainer, the device that keeps the Station working. The group are in what is effectively a locked room, unable to rejoin or communicate with, the Time Streams. The bomb is ticking, with thirty minutes to go, and without the Major Retainer to return them to their usual position there’s seemingly no way that our characters can avoid the Place becoming ‘a sun in a bag’….
I’m really not sure why I dismissed this one before. I just didn’t get it, or was too young to realise. Perhaps it was the cynicism, the dark tone, the sly adultness in a story that initially seems quite simple. Leiber plays with the SF conventions, using ideas that seem simple, yet are quite complex, often in a word or sentence. And it is quite clever, working on more than one level of understanding. For example, instead of ‘Recuperation Station’, read ‘brothel’; for ‘Entertainer’, read ‘prostitute’. Employed by the races at war, but in a way that allows 1950’s publication.
And then there’s the joyous, exuberant use of language:
“Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints of the Change War.”
To be honest, there are places where the dialogue is a little clunky. 16th century’s character Sydney Lessingham’s Olde Englyshe is perhaps the most irritating. Generally though, the dialogue’s not as bad as some books I’ve read from the same time. I can see why some might see it as ‘stagey’ – there’s a lot of info-dumping, and dialogue that can stray into monologue at times, although, (again), I’ve read worse from that time. This may be attributable to Leiber’s personal background in the theatre, and probably explains the many references to Shakespeare, Rupert Brooke, Tennyson and the like herein. But if you can cope with the extract above, you shouldn’t find the rest of the book a problem.
Lieber’s known for his unusual characters in his writing, and here’s no exception. It is a small but diverse bunch of characters that are our focus here, to help us make sense of what is going on. We have soldiers from all time periods at the Station, including Mark/Marcus the Roman, Erich the Nazi, Kaby, a female warrior from Crete, Sevensee the satyr from the far future and even an alien furry-octopus from Luna named Ilhilihis/Illy. Of the characters included, Erich is perhaps the most clichéd, although perhaps not too surprising being little more than a decade after World War Two. Nazis were very much the villain of the time – see also Robert Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo (1947).
Our narrator, ballet dancer Greta, is an unusual mix of film star wannabe and psychologist, who has seen too much in her twenty-nine years, and in other ways not enough. Through her narrative we are only seeing one perspective, and it may not be entirely accurate. The Change War clearly affects the combatants, having to deal with the past, present and future simultaneously. Indeed, it is possible that what we are reading here is nothing but an altered memory, ‘a crazy, mixed up dream’. This is an idea that clearly lends itself to the psychedelia of the 1960’s, and also fits entirely with the strangely unreal place between, and beyond, the time streams. Similar things do happen in Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels, too. (It also explains my 1960’s book cover, too, as shown at the top of this review.)
But for me most of all, it is the breath-taking places and events that have changed, often mentioned in one sentence that are memorable. Crete is built up at the expense of Greece, causing the disappearance of Greek culture, Rome collapses a few years after the death of Julius Caesar, the German Nazis occupy Europe after the US and England do not take part in World War Two, “from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!” All mentioned briefly, in little more than a sentence. Despite the focus on the characters being small, the breadth of the impact of the Change War is stunning:
“But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world—one little solar system… and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.”
The Big Time is also a book about war. It is clear that the constant to-ing and fro-ing is affecting our combatants. Their nerves are shot, their behaviour erratic, with paranoia and weariness often exhibited. War is hell, and constant war across time even more so. The people involved are often killed, and their ‘Resurrection’, to play their part in the War again, is both terrifying and humblingly bleak, although, interestingly, Leiber enigmatically points out towards the end that ‘The Change War isn't the blind destruction it seems.’
War-weary cynicism mixed with deadpan humour, cosmic concepts given over in a sentence, and the relative brevity of the book together gives The Big Time’s narrative a hefty punch. Less is definitely more here.
In summary, I’m pleased I went back to this one. It’s not perfect, and definitely not for everyone, but it’s not bad at all. In summary, The Big Time is an underrated attention-grabber of a story, which left me thinking on it long after I’d finished it. And I guess, despite its flaws and despite the strong opposition, that’s why it won a Hugo.
*As indeed was the Award: it was the only year where the now-traditional ‘rocket’ was replaced by a much more boring looking plaque. This was rescinded in 1959.
Published 1958 in Galaxy Magazine, novel 1961. (Edition Read: Ace Books, (1961), 130 pages)
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958.
Review by Mark Yon
This is one of those reviews I occasionally do about older books, perhaps a little forgotten.
It came about because I was thinking the other day about past Hugo winners, following a discussion over at SFFWorld about the 2013 nominees. That gave way to my remembering that, in my teens, there was a time when I ambitiously tried to read as many Hugo Award winning novels as I could. It was a venture that was rather doomed to failure – they weren’t easily available to a poor lad in a small town in Northern England in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, and so after a lot of the obvious ones (Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land ) I went on to read other things.
But The Big Time was one that I didn’t read beyond the first few pages. I remember looking at my Dune and my Stranger in a Strange Land, both hefty novels, and thinking “How could a book of little more than 100 pages be worthy of a Hugo?” And then I dismissed it, even though I liked a lot of Leiber’s other novels and stories.
Winner of the fourth Hugo Best Novel in 1958, today it is often seen as a bit of a surprise winner.*
In the years since 1958, The Big Time has become one of those books that, alongside Mark Clifton’s winning novel They’d Rather Be Right in 1955, has been questioned as a worthy winner, or at best regarded as ‘just’ a minor winner. Jo Walton at Tor.com has said that other novels that could’ve been worthy of inclusion (and for comparison here) are “Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Jack Vance’s Big Planet, Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets and Eye in the Sky, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, Robert Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer and Citizen of the Galaxy, Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, Van Vogt’s The Empire of the Atom, Philip Jose Farmer’s The Green Odyssey, Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Frederic Brown’s Rogue in Space, and Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp.” Many of these I’ve read, and they remain fond favourites. Is The Big Time really better than those?
Looking around, the opinions about The Big Time seem to polarise. The aforementioned Jo Walton said that she likes The Big Time, but “although it’s in print I don’t hear it talked about much”. Alternatively, Sam Jordison at the Guardian UK newspaper stated when he read it, ‘The best thing that can be said about it is that it's mercifully short.’ However, it was selected for inclusion in the Library of America's two-volume compilation American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and therefore perhaps should be seen as important.
With such differentiated opinions, I felt it was clearly time for a revisit. And I’m pleased I did.
The basic idea of the novel has become a bit of a cliché these days – there is a time war, the Change War, between two alien factions, named ‘The Spiders’ and ‘The Snakes’. Both sides travel across space and time, trying to alter the past and the future to their own needs, and have agents doing their work for them. The story takes place at the Place, a ‘Recuperation Station’, where ‘Entertainer’ Greta Forzane is one of a team who provides rest and relaxation for battle-weary soldiers. Told from Greta’s perspective, the narrative is rather small and focussed, a story of what crime readers would call ‘a locked room mystery’.
When a mission going through the Recuperation Station goes wrong, Greta and her colleagues find themselves with three Hussar soldiers and an atomic bomb, originally on the way to save Rome. Whilst discussing what to do and catching up with the latest events from the War, the whole Place becomes Introverted - isolated from space and time with the loss of its Major Maintainer, the device that keeps the Station working. The group are in what is effectively a locked room, unable to rejoin or communicate with, the Time Streams. The bomb is ticking, with thirty minutes to go, and without the Major Retainer to return them to their usual position there’s seemingly no way that our characters can avoid the Place becoming ‘a sun in a bag’….
I’m really not sure why I dismissed this one before. I just didn’t get it, or was too young to realise. Perhaps it was the cynicism, the dark tone, the sly adultness in a story that initially seems quite simple. Leiber plays with the SF conventions, using ideas that seem simple, yet are quite complex, often in a word or sentence. And it is quite clever, working on more than one level of understanding. For example, instead of ‘Recuperation Station’, read ‘brothel’; for ‘Entertainer’, read ‘prostitute’. Employed by the races at war, but in a way that allows 1950’s publication.
And then there’s the joyous, exuberant use of language:
“Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the story-book kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints of the Change War.”
To be honest, there are places where the dialogue is a little clunky. 16th century’s character Sydney Lessingham’s Olde Englyshe is perhaps the most irritating. Generally though, the dialogue’s not as bad as some books I’ve read from the same time. I can see why some might see it as ‘stagey’ – there’s a lot of info-dumping, and dialogue that can stray into monologue at times, although, (again), I’ve read worse from that time. This may be attributable to Leiber’s personal background in the theatre, and probably explains the many references to Shakespeare, Rupert Brooke, Tennyson and the like herein. But if you can cope with the extract above, you shouldn’t find the rest of the book a problem.
Lieber’s known for his unusual characters in his writing, and here’s no exception. It is a small but diverse bunch of characters that are our focus here, to help us make sense of what is going on. We have soldiers from all time periods at the Station, including Mark/Marcus the Roman, Erich the Nazi, Kaby, a female warrior from Crete, Sevensee the satyr from the far future and even an alien furry-octopus from Luna named Ilhilihis/Illy. Of the characters included, Erich is perhaps the most clichéd, although perhaps not too surprising being little more than a decade after World War Two. Nazis were very much the villain of the time – see also Robert Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo (1947).
Our narrator, ballet dancer Greta, is an unusual mix of film star wannabe and psychologist, who has seen too much in her twenty-nine years, and in other ways not enough. Through her narrative we are only seeing one perspective, and it may not be entirely accurate. The Change War clearly affects the combatants, having to deal with the past, present and future simultaneously. Indeed, it is possible that what we are reading here is nothing but an altered memory, ‘a crazy, mixed up dream’. This is an idea that clearly lends itself to the psychedelia of the 1960’s, and also fits entirely with the strangely unreal place between, and beyond, the time streams. Similar things do happen in Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels, too. (It also explains my 1960’s book cover, too, as shown at the top of this review.)
But for me most of all, it is the breath-taking places and events that have changed, often mentioned in one sentence that are memorable. Crete is built up at the expense of Greece, causing the disappearance of Greek culture, Rome collapses a few years after the death of Julius Caesar, the German Nazis occupy Europe after the US and England do not take part in World War Two, “from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!” All mentioned briefly, in little more than a sentence. Despite the focus on the characters being small, the breadth of the impact of the Change War is stunning:
“But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world—one little solar system… and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.”
The Big Time is also a book about war. It is clear that the constant to-ing and fro-ing is affecting our combatants. Their nerves are shot, their behaviour erratic, with paranoia and weariness often exhibited. War is hell, and constant war across time even more so. The people involved are often killed, and their ‘Resurrection’, to play their part in the War again, is both terrifying and humblingly bleak, although, interestingly, Leiber enigmatically points out towards the end that ‘The Change War isn't the blind destruction it seems.’
War-weary cynicism mixed with deadpan humour, cosmic concepts given over in a sentence, and the relative brevity of the book together gives The Big Time’s narrative a hefty punch. Less is definitely more here.
In summary, I’m pleased I went back to this one. It’s not perfect, and definitely not for everyone, but it’s not bad at all. In summary, The Big Time is an underrated attention-grabber of a story, which left me thinking on it long after I’d finished it. And I guess, despite its flaws and despite the strong opposition, that’s why it won a Hugo.
*As indeed was the Award: it was the only year where the now-traditional ‘rocket’ was replaced by a much more boring looking plaque. This was rescinded in 1959.
February 21, 2019
I found this title here on Goodreads and checked it out from my local library. The cover graphic looked hip and the title page said it was published in 2011, but when I started reading I was confused. The writing seemed so... dated. So I backtracked and re-read the description and amazingly found this book was published in 1958! The concept seemed so modern, so cool and contemporary, and yet the chestnut of the idea was from a lifetime ago.
3 stars out of 5. It's a really intriguing concept but the old pulpy sci-fi writing robs it of energy.
3 stars out of 5. It's a really intriguing concept but the old pulpy sci-fi writing robs it of energy.
May 1, 2008
A bunch of wooden, unconvincing characters—refugees, in a sense, from the Time War—are stuck in the Place together, a safe space outside of time that’s used for soldiers’ R&R. Except the Place has been sabotaged, and there’s a bomb and possibly a traitor in their midst and blah blah blah…man, this was boring. The characters, as I said, had all the texture and depth of my cardboard Spike stand-up, the plot was rather half-assed, and the whole thing just felt very juvenile, like the sort of story I used to encounter in my college creative writing workshop. And this won a Hugo? Sigh. Well, at least it was short.
January 8, 2023
This is a strange SF novel from 1958 that mixes time travel, parallel universes and a locked room mystery. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for January 2023 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group.
A few words about the book’s status: it is a novella according to modern standards (below 40’000 words) published in the same year as it was nominated (now only works from the previous year are eligible). It was published originally in two parts in Galaxy Magazine's March and April 1958 issues and won 1958 Hugo Awards for Best Novel or Novelette (unlike the current separation of the two). It is unknown what its competitors were, but Jo Walton in her article at Tor.com lists possible candidates.
The story is told by Greta Forzane and as the book’s first paragraphs go, this one is pretty amazing:
My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time—not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either.
She works at as a girl (which includes everything from a shoulder to cry on to prostitution) at a Recuperation Station where soldiers recover from battles. They aren’t usual soldiers or battles, for they are fought in different times and realities as a part of a great conflict between enigmatic Spiders and Snakes. “Our” side is Spiders and consists of a quite diverse collection of soldiers, not all of whom are even human – there is a Lunar octopoid and Venusian satyr, as well as an Amazonian, a Roman, a Nazi, a space commando and others. A group just returned from a failed mission - the kidnapping of the infant Einstein from Saint Petersburg in 1883, when Tzarist Russia fought against Hitler… as I said, parallel universes. There are old and new visitors and they bring both new ideas with them and a way of disconnecting the Station from the rest of the universe and maybe destroying everyone present.
The story is rather short so I won’t go in greater detail here, but it is definitely worth a read. Published after Paratime Police: Complete Sci-Fi Series: Police Operation, He Walked Around the Horses, Last Enemy, Temple Trouble, Genesis, Time Crime, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen & Down Styphon by H. Beam Piper but before Time Patrol by Poul Anderson, which also deals with time traveling military, for me it sounded novel enough, its concepts are nice and thought out, it has rare for those times female protagonist, and while there are phrases here and there, which may sound obsolete for a modern reader, overall it isn’t a cringy read, quite the opposite. As a side note that surprised me – there is a Nazi character fighting on “our” side – this is just a dozen years after the victory in WW2, and while he is far from good, he isn’t an eternal evil, but a soldier.
A few words about the book’s status: it is a novella according to modern standards (below 40’000 words) published in the same year as it was nominated (now only works from the previous year are eligible). It was published originally in two parts in Galaxy Magazine's March and April 1958 issues and won 1958 Hugo Awards for Best Novel or Novelette (unlike the current separation of the two). It is unknown what its competitors were, but Jo Walton in her article at Tor.com lists possible candidates.
The story is told by Greta Forzane and as the book’s first paragraphs go, this one is pretty amazing:
My name is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time—not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know either.
She works at as a girl (which includes everything from a shoulder to cry on to prostitution) at a Recuperation Station where soldiers recover from battles. They aren’t usual soldiers or battles, for they are fought in different times and realities as a part of a great conflict between enigmatic Spiders and Snakes. “Our” side is Spiders and consists of a quite diverse collection of soldiers, not all of whom are even human – there is a Lunar octopoid and Venusian satyr, as well as an Amazonian, a Roman, a Nazi, a space commando and others. A group just returned from a failed mission - the kidnapping of the infant Einstein from Saint Petersburg in 1883, when Tzarist Russia fought against Hitler… as I said, parallel universes. There are old and new visitors and they bring both new ideas with them and a way of disconnecting the Station from the rest of the universe and maybe destroying everyone present.
The story is rather short so I won’t go in greater detail here, but it is definitely worth a read. Published after Paratime Police: Complete Sci-Fi Series: Police Operation, He Walked Around the Horses, Last Enemy, Temple Trouble, Genesis, Time Crime, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen & Down Styphon by H. Beam Piper but before Time Patrol by Poul Anderson, which also deals with time traveling military, for me it sounded novel enough, its concepts are nice and thought out, it has rare for those times female protagonist, and while there are phrases here and there, which may sound obsolete for a modern reader, overall it isn’t a cringy read, quite the opposite. As a side note that surprised me – there is a Nazi character fighting on “our” side – this is just a dozen years after the victory in WW2, and while he is far from good, he isn’t an eternal evil, but a soldier.
August 6, 2019
Great concept, with humanity serving as pawns in an eons long, cosmic wide temporal war. There are some real flashes of brilliance and excellent prose here, however the story suffers to some extent by some obtuse dialogue and the 1950's era gender and cultural stereotyping.
March 21, 2018
Imagine two groups waging war against each other by time traveling and altering History in various ways to make the world be like what they want it to be.
A pretty neat premise with the type of execution that does absolutely nothing for me.
You know when you end up going to a place with a friend's or partner's friends from their work, hobby or etc and then you sit there and hear they laughing at their own jokes, making references or speaking terms that only they know what the heck it's about, and etc?
So here you have a group of guys from one of the groups (the Spiders) who passes most of the story in a room chatting about what they did or saw the other side (the Snakes) doing.
They mention things like the enemy making Britain and the US not enter WWII so Hitler ends up dominating the world. Then they go back in time to make him lose. There's even a mention of a battle of Chicago.
Then at some other point the other side goes back and kidnaps Einstein as a baby (!) to keep him to Nazi Germany. Then they have to go back to prevent that.
At some other point they poison Cleopatra, do something to Julius Caesar, prevent Greek philosophy from ever spreading outside Greece, are joined by ETs because in the future we make contact and they also join the time travel war, and some other crazy stuff.
The problem? All this is never shown. These guys are simply in a room simply chatting this stuff. "You remember that operation when they kidnapped baby Einstein?" "Oh yeah, then we had to intervene, that op was crazy, man!", "what about that time we poisoned Churchill and Cleopatra?" "oh yeah, that one was great too!".
Well, if all this stuff is simply mentioned like that like this I was expecting some even crazier action to happen.
Sadly, it never does.
Now, this approach is seen in many other books, but they have two other things: 1) they have something big happening (or about to happen) in the present and 2) it's possible later, whether through the narrative or "working the puzzle", to understand what happened, what's actually happening, why, and etc. Glen Cook, for example, does this really well.
And this also doesn't happen here.
So if all the crazy stuff is so distantly told to us, at least there are some good and memorable characters, right?
And again, no and it's probably the worst aspect of the story as you don't care about anyone.
Which is also the saddest part, simply because this is a time travel war and the characters come from various different times. This alone had the potential for insane moments and to carry the story alone even with a weak plot.
There's a girl from early 10's, an ex-nazi, two ETs, and people from other periods, all working together against an enemy with similar resources. And... nada.
Again, great premise. Also had great potential. But not the execution.
A pretty neat premise with the type of execution that does absolutely nothing for me.
You know when you end up going to a place with a friend's or partner's friends from their work, hobby or etc and then you sit there and hear they laughing at their own jokes, making references or speaking terms that only they know what the heck it's about, and etc?
So here you have a group of guys from one of the groups (the Spiders) who passes most of the story in a room chatting about what they did or saw the other side (the Snakes) doing.
They mention things like the enemy making Britain and the US not enter WWII so Hitler ends up dominating the world. Then they go back in time to make him lose. There's even a mention of a battle of Chicago.
Then at some other point the other side goes back and kidnaps Einstein as a baby (!) to keep him to Nazi Germany. Then they have to go back to prevent that.
At some other point they poison Cleopatra, do something to Julius Caesar, prevent Greek philosophy from ever spreading outside Greece, are joined by ETs because in the future we make contact and they also join the time travel war, and some other crazy stuff.
The problem? All this is never shown. These guys are simply in a room simply chatting this stuff. "You remember that operation when they kidnapped baby Einstein?" "Oh yeah, then we had to intervene, that op was crazy, man!", "what about that time we poisoned Churchill and Cleopatra?" "oh yeah, that one was great too!".
Well, if all this stuff is simply mentioned like that like this I was expecting some even crazier action to happen.
Sadly, it never does.
Now, this approach is seen in many other books, but they have two other things: 1) they have something big happening (or about to happen) in the present and 2) it's possible later, whether through the narrative or "working the puzzle", to understand what happened, what's actually happening, why, and etc. Glen Cook, for example, does this really well.
And this also doesn't happen here.
So if all the crazy stuff is so distantly told to us, at least there are some good and memorable characters, right?
And again, no and it's probably the worst aspect of the story as you don't care about anyone.
Which is also the saddest part, simply because this is a time travel war and the characters come from various different times. This alone had the potential for insane moments and to carry the story alone even with a weak plot.
There's a girl from early 10's, an ex-nazi, two ETs, and people from other periods, all working together against an enemy with similar resources. And... nada.
Again, great premise. Also had great potential. But not the execution.
October 1, 2018
A strange little book. Written in 1958, it is far ahead of its time stylistically. It reads like a "new wave" novel written by say, Philip Josee Framer, Brunner or even Vonnagut (but he would have taken it much farther). It must be read at least twice (for me three times), to get the gist. At first reading, it was over just when I finally thought I might have gotten on to what was going on.
While reading this, I thought, what a great and unique scifi stage play this would make.
While reading this, I thought, what a great and unique scifi stage play this would make.
December 10, 2021
Pongo a Dios por testigo que nunca más volveré a leer a Fritz Leiber.
Hace unos meses abandoné El planeta errante pero le quise dar otra oportunidad y leerme el segundo premio Hugo que tiene por El gran tiempo. Tenía pinta más interesante: En una guerra milenaria a través del tiempo y del espacio entre las Arañas y las Serpientes, la protagonista es la encargada de cuidar a los caídos en una casa de reposo fuera del tiempo y del espacio.
Pero lo que me he encontrado ha sido lo mismo que en el anterior: personajes redichos con un humor que no pillo y donde el autor se centra en las conversaciones en esa casa de reposo en lugar de enseñarnos algo más de esa guerra.
Hace unos meses abandoné El planeta errante pero le quise dar otra oportunidad y leerme el segundo premio Hugo que tiene por El gran tiempo. Tenía pinta más interesante: En una guerra milenaria a través del tiempo y del espacio entre las Arañas y las Serpientes, la protagonista es la encargada de cuidar a los caídos en una casa de reposo fuera del tiempo y del espacio.
Pero lo que me he encontrado ha sido lo mismo que en el anterior: personajes redichos con un humor que no pillo y donde el autor se centra en las conversaciones en esa casa de reposo en lugar de enseñarnos algo más de esa guerra.
February 6, 2022
This won a Hugo?? Some older books really just do not hold up over time... besides the obvious tech issues, also really misogynistic, but the "Change War" time concept itself was pretty good... still meh.
February 2, 2020
First of the Change War series, the battle across time between the Spiders and the Snakes to determine the fate of the universe. In The Big Time, warriors and entertainers resurrected from across time and space are trapped in a relief station in the Big Time, a zone between normal reality and the Void, with a ticking time bombs both physical and emotional.
March 25, 2008
i was secretary to this brilliant human being, and this is my personal favorite book of all of his remarkable titles. [the 'change wars' cycle has other goodies too]
August 3, 2016
(4/63) In my Hugo Read-Through
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber won the fourth Hugo Award for novel in 1958. It’s my fourth stop on my read-through and so far, my least favorite.
This book... frustrated me to no end, I was extremely disappointed and the back is hilariously wrong at it's description.
For those who haven't read my reviews, I'm very rambling and don't always have a clear path in my thoughts, however it's my honest rant style opinion of the book, so hopefully someone will appreciate it.
If you want my quick response, without the rambles that make no sense, it's this: This book was just about people in a room, therefore the author should have taken more care in his characters, they were all vacant and unrealistic, completely unbelievable and ultimately completely forgettable, he had too many and developed none of them. It was a frustrating read, and made me grumpy.
Ok now my rant;
This is the description on the back of the 1961 Ace publication of this book. I don't know P.Schuyler Miller, and I sure as heck don't know what book he read, cause it wasn't this one. If by a a superior adventure-mystery he means a bunch of characters sitting in a room getting grumpy at each other, and the mystery is solved at the end by the author introducing a machine that wasn't mentioned once throughout the whole book, therefore making the main characters "aha!" moment completely unconnectable too, then yes, this is a SUPERIOR Adventure-Mystery.
There is no adventure in this book, there is barely any mystery, and not one that you can try and deduce in anyway. There are barely characters.
This book winning a Hugo surprises me, and honestly worries me about my future read. I thought I was in the clear when I liked They'd Rather be Right the book that's notorious for being the "Worst" Hugo winner. How can people possibly read both of these and say that one was bad?
Technically this is well written, as in the way it was written, and it was a quick easy read, but by no means (to me, and my opinion of books) is this a good book. Fritz Leiber sets up this interesting Change-War, a war that is fought by editing and changing historical events in the past, present and future. A broken and endless war, cause if both sides can manipulate time it'll just go on forever. Time Travel is tricky business, and honestly a book about time-travel is difficult to do well. What surprises me, is that the time-travel isn't what messed this book up.
This book is told completely through a group arguing in a room. No joke, a bunch of characters in a room, just arguing. So I turned on my "character-based drama" brain, and prepped myself for not a lot of excitement but something more character focused. The thing is the characters in this... were awfully developed and written. The story is told from the point of view of I believe she's 23, but a 20+ year old girl, which it's painfully obvious Leiber never was, authors can write from the perspective of another gender, but he cannot, at all. She was vacant, emotionless, ditzy, ignorant and dull. She had no opinions, sided with whoever was talking, and added absolutely nothing to the story. Also casually talked about her Nazi lover abusing her, very casually. So then there is him Erich, the hot-headed ex-nazi, whose entire purpose was just to put a wrench in things. There were two ETs, a Alien from the Moon (from thousands of years in the past) and a Satyr from thousands of years in the future, however these characters were obviously here to try and make the author look like he thought of some original characters from other time periods, to drill in the idea that this war spans our entire time line, however they had like 5 lines of dialogue each.
The main character is an entertainer, and her and her band of fellow entertainers are meant to, well entertain, soldiers on break from battles. Her fellow entertainers are from different time periods, which can only be deduced from either her thinking it, pointing out their clothes, or the authors attempts at their dialogue being different. Then there are the soldiers that are visiting, a group of three I believe, and then the unexpected soldiers, another group of three.
I'm generalizing this to make a point. He puts so many characters in this room, in this short book, that none of them except maybe two get more than 5 lines of dialogue. They are all underdeveloped and honestly completely forgettable.
He tried to do some cool characters from across time, but was lazy about it. Also was obviously not creative enough to have a personality that wasn't straight out of the 50s, every guy was dismissive of women, and them talking and them doing things, and thought all they wanted was to ensnare men, regardless of the time period the man came from he saw women this way. Also every woman as soon as she was left to her own devises wanted to make babies.
I usually don't care about this, and would write it off to when this book was written. But the two Hugo's prior to this didn't treat women this way.
The one strong female, Kaby was forgotten almost as soon as she arrived; she had some dialogue then reappeared at the end.
To top it off, the characters thoughts and interactions didn't make any sense. The character Lili (a recent addition to the entertainers) meets Bruce (a poet and soldier) who was from her same time period and she had had a crush on and within an hour was calling him her Fiancé, and they both were trying to run off together. The whole book was just those two being selfish and making choices for everyone else and then, in the end, they aren't even together anymore! This all happens in like a 2hr span! It's insane! Completely unbelievable. Then there's Erich who when no one agreed with him tried to nuke the place.
I don't know. It was frustrating. It left an annoying taste in my mouth.
In Conclusion
I really, really, really did not like this book. From beginning to end, I was frustrated and waiting for the book to happen. I’m ultimately surprised this won an award, and am not terribly excited to read his other winner. I think I’d be more interested in reading his horror, as he is sometimes affiliated with Lovecraft, one of my favorite authors.
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber won the fourth Hugo Award for novel in 1958. It’s my fourth stop on my read-through and so far, my least favorite.
This book... frustrated me to no end, I was extremely disappointed and the back is hilariously wrong at it's description.
For those who haven't read my reviews, I'm very rambling and don't always have a clear path in my thoughts, however it's my honest rant style opinion of the book, so hopefully someone will appreciate it.
If you want my quick response, without the rambles that make no sense, it's this: This book was just about people in a room, therefore the author should have taken more care in his characters, they were all vacant and unrealistic, completely unbelievable and ultimately completely forgettable, he had too many and developed none of them. It was a frustrating read, and made me grumpy.
Ok now my rant;
"A superior adventure-mystery about the strangely assorted crew of men and women, snatched out of their lives by emissaries from the far future, who fight and scheme to change the structure of time and history." -P. Schuyler Miller, Analog.
This is the description on the back of the 1961 Ace publication of this book. I don't know P.Schuyler Miller, and I sure as heck don't know what book he read, cause it wasn't this one. If by a a superior adventure-mystery he means a bunch of characters sitting in a room getting grumpy at each other, and the mystery is solved at the end by the author introducing a machine that wasn't mentioned once throughout the whole book, therefore making the main characters "aha!" moment completely unconnectable too, then yes, this is a SUPERIOR Adventure-Mystery.
There is no adventure in this book, there is barely any mystery, and not one that you can try and deduce in anyway. There are barely characters.
This book winning a Hugo surprises me, and honestly worries me about my future read. I thought I was in the clear when I liked They'd Rather be Right the book that's notorious for being the "Worst" Hugo winner. How can people possibly read both of these and say that one was bad?
Technically this is well written, as in the way it was written, and it was a quick easy read, but by no means (to me, and my opinion of books) is this a good book. Fritz Leiber sets up this interesting Change-War, a war that is fought by editing and changing historical events in the past, present and future. A broken and endless war, cause if both sides can manipulate time it'll just go on forever. Time Travel is tricky business, and honestly a book about time-travel is difficult to do well. What surprises me, is that the time-travel isn't what messed this book up.
This book is told completely through a group arguing in a room. No joke, a bunch of characters in a room, just arguing. So I turned on my "character-based drama" brain, and prepped myself for not a lot of excitement but something more character focused. The thing is the characters in this... were awfully developed and written. The story is told from the point of view of I believe she's 23, but a 20+ year old girl, which it's painfully obvious Leiber never was, authors can write from the perspective of another gender, but he cannot, at all. She was vacant, emotionless, ditzy, ignorant and dull. She had no opinions, sided with whoever was talking, and added absolutely nothing to the story. Also casually talked about her Nazi lover abusing her, very casually. So then there is him Erich, the hot-headed ex-nazi, whose entire purpose was just to put a wrench in things. There were two ETs, a Alien from the Moon (from thousands of years in the past) and a Satyr from thousands of years in the future, however these characters were obviously here to try and make the author look like he thought of some original characters from other time periods, to drill in the idea that this war spans our entire time line, however they had like 5 lines of dialogue each.
The main character is an entertainer, and her and her band of fellow entertainers are meant to, well entertain, soldiers on break from battles. Her fellow entertainers are from different time periods, which can only be deduced from either her thinking it, pointing out their clothes, or the authors attempts at their dialogue being different. Then there are the soldiers that are visiting, a group of three I believe, and then the unexpected soldiers, another group of three.
I'm generalizing this to make a point. He puts so many characters in this room, in this short book, that none of them except maybe two get more than 5 lines of dialogue. They are all underdeveloped and honestly completely forgettable.
He tried to do some cool characters from across time, but was lazy about it. Also was obviously not creative enough to have a personality that wasn't straight out of the 50s, every guy was dismissive of women, and them talking and them doing things, and thought all they wanted was to ensnare men, regardless of the time period the man came from he saw women this way. Also every woman as soon as she was left to her own devises wanted to make babies.
I usually don't care about this, and would write it off to when this book was written. But the two Hugo's prior to this didn't treat women this way.
The one strong female, Kaby was forgotten almost as soon as she arrived; she had some dialogue then reappeared at the end.
To top it off, the characters thoughts and interactions didn't make any sense. The character Lili (a recent addition to the entertainers) meets Bruce (a poet and soldier) who was from her same time period and she had had a crush on and within an hour was calling him her Fiancé, and they both were trying to run off together. The whole book was just those two being selfish and making choices for everyone else and then, in the end, they aren't even together anymore! This all happens in like a 2hr span! It's insane! Completely unbelievable. Then there's Erich who when no one agreed with him tried to nuke the place.
I don't know. It was frustrating. It left an annoying taste in my mouth.
In Conclusion
I really, really, really did not like this book. From beginning to end, I was frustrated and waiting for the book to happen. I’m ultimately surprised this won an award, and am not terribly excited to read his other winner. I think I’d be more interested in reading his horror, as he is sometimes affiliated with Lovecraft, one of my favorite authors.
November 17, 2011
Ah the joys of pulp. One can just picture Fritz working frantically through a weekend to make deadline on this thing: throwing ideas around with reckless haste, recognizing a line as a clunker and just moving on, abandoning thoughts without revising them out of the manuscript because there's no time for perfection, dammit! Rent's due!
At least, that's how I imagine it. This book is decidedly slap-dash, half-baked and all over the place. And yet, I give it a lot more credit than some well polished works that rehash a bunch of old ideas.
So what are these ideas that Leiber is throwing around? This is a book about time travel, yet there's no actual time traveling in it. It's ostensibly about a major conflict, but the enemy never appears. For all intents and purposes, this is a one act play where all the action takes place in a single room, with a cast of about 10 actors. These are meant to be representative of all history, and so (in typical 50s sci-fi fashion) we have an ancient Roman, a Nazi, two extra-terrestrials and a bunch of Brits or Americans from various time periods. They consider themselves supernatural (they call themselves "Demons") and are decidedly fuzzy about their metaphysical state. I think it's fair to say that this book owes as much to "No Exit" as to anything printed by Campbell.
But (and here's where things start to get interesting) what happens to the Nazi when that particular historical thread is changed? He doesn't cease to exist, as you might expect. In Leiber's cosmos he has an additional identity for the new history. Since these folks are involved in a time traveling war, all of the characters have several such identities that co-exist in them outside of normal (also known as "Little") time. Possible ramifications are hinted at, but nothing is well developed in this rather slight(130 page) book.
In short, this isn't a good book but it's an interesting one. I don't recommend it, but I'll probably mention it in conversation. Good on ya Fritz, I hope you got the rent paid on time.
At least, that's how I imagine it. This book is decidedly slap-dash, half-baked and all over the place. And yet, I give it a lot more credit than some well polished works that rehash a bunch of old ideas.
So what are these ideas that Leiber is throwing around? This is a book about time travel, yet there's no actual time traveling in it. It's ostensibly about a major conflict, but the enemy never appears. For all intents and purposes, this is a one act play where all the action takes place in a single room, with a cast of about 10 actors. These are meant to be representative of all history, and so (in typical 50s sci-fi fashion) we have an ancient Roman, a Nazi, two extra-terrestrials and a bunch of Brits or Americans from various time periods. They consider themselves supernatural (they call themselves "Demons") and are decidedly fuzzy about their metaphysical state. I think it's fair to say that this book owes as much to "No Exit" as to anything printed by Campbell.
But (and here's where things start to get interesting) what happens to the Nazi when that particular historical thread is changed? He doesn't cease to exist, as you might expect. In Leiber's cosmos he has an additional identity for the new history. Since these folks are involved in a time traveling war, all of the characters have several such identities that co-exist in them outside of normal (also known as "Little") time. Possible ramifications are hinted at, but nothing is well developed in this rather slight(130 page) book.
In short, this isn't a good book but it's an interesting one. I don't recommend it, but I'll probably mention it in conversation. Good on ya Fritz, I hope you got the rent paid on time.
May 4, 2010
4.0 stars. A brilliantly conceived novel of an eternity spanning "Change War" between two extremely powerful, and extremely mysterious, groups. Arguably Fritz Leiber's best novel. Recommended!!
Winner: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1958)
Nominee: British Science Fiction Award (Retro) for Best Novel (1958)
Winner: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1958)
Nominee: British Science Fiction Award (Retro) for Best Novel (1958)
October 28, 2015
what does he wants to say ?
is this a mystery novel
is it time travel
is it philosophical depute about faith and doubt ,war and peace , what love can make us do
what the fuck is it !!!!!
is this a mystery novel
is it time travel
is it philosophical depute about faith and doubt ,war and peace , what love can make us do
what the fuck is it !!!!!
January 15, 2023
This was such a STRANGE book, and I mean that it was really out there. Leiber takes us to one of hell's roadhouse called the Recuperation Station as the time-traveling warriors come in and out for good times with the resident angels and demons in the midst of their journeys. The conflict between Spiders and Snakes in the Change War serves as a background although we never figure out much about why they have those names or even what the conflict is about. The characters are in a sort of bobble (see The Peace War outside of normal spacetime but able to intersect with various timelines) and eventually are faced with possible annihilation due to a bomb placed inside their Recuperation Station. The concept of Little Time refers to our own timeline whereas the Big Time is a train that rides along all the instances of Little Time...yeah, it is wacky and confusing.
Once you get over the weirdness, it does have some quirky humor and it might be one of the first explicit instances of a multiverse in sci-fi literature (after that of The Gods Themselves.
Once you get over the weirdness, it does have some quirky humor and it might be one of the first explicit instances of a multiverse in sci-fi literature (after that of The Gods Themselves.
August 9, 2019
This was quite a surprise for me.
I read this work in my personal award-winners challenge and was expecting some 50ies SF along the line of Heinlein. But this weird, surrealistic piece turned out to be a chamber drama told from the POV of a party girl who belongs to a group of 'Entertainers' whose job it is to give soldiers a bit of recreational time between their missions in a time war orchestrated by two obscure factions. The soldiers are recruted from anywhere in past and future (among them the for me quite irritating Nazi German) and are playing havoc with history - including trying to help ancient Romans with an atom bomb.
Everything is told in (sometimes rather staged) dialogues and monologues, we never leave this chamber that is outside of space and time. Nothing is really explained, the characters stay on the surface, yet the charme of this short novel is the weirdness of it all. I felt myself enchanted and intrigued by this time travel experiment, that was so completely other than I expected from this time and genre.
My only issue was with an interesting explanation that came as an info dumping near the end and would have merited more attention.
This was my first book by Fritz Leiber and now I want to read more of this unique author.
I read this work in my personal award-winners challenge and was expecting some 50ies SF along the line of Heinlein. But this weird, surrealistic piece turned out to be a chamber drama told from the POV of a party girl who belongs to a group of 'Entertainers' whose job it is to give soldiers a bit of recreational time between their missions in a time war orchestrated by two obscure factions. The soldiers are recruted from anywhere in past and future (among them the for me quite irritating Nazi German) and are playing havoc with history - including trying to help ancient Romans with an atom bomb.
Everything is told in (sometimes rather staged) dialogues and monologues, we never leave this chamber that is outside of space and time. Nothing is really explained, the characters stay on the surface, yet the charme of this short novel is the weirdness of it all. I felt myself enchanted and intrigued by this time travel experiment, that was so completely other than I expected from this time and genre.
My only issue was with an interesting explanation that came as an info dumping near the end and would have merited more attention.
This was my first book by Fritz Leiber and now I want to read more of this unique author.
November 7, 2007
(I have an old Ace Books edition that can't be found here, *sigh*, so I added this edition, since it looks the closest to mine.)
This is supposed to be one of Leiber's best, with a lot of philosophical stuff in the action... So I am looking forward to reading it now:-)
More later.
Okay--LATER:
I have read this book now, and I am in two minds. On the one hand it is a highly intelligent and an impressively weaved story evolving around a unique blend of philosophical ideas & "hip" 1950s/60s sci-fi; on the other it is a soap drama with loads of references to classic literature & drama.
The first part I must say is so amazing that Leiber's story has left ever-lasting impressions on my mind. And a cleverer plot device using the Einsteinean concept of Time (in philosophical language called "Static Time") is hard to imagine.
Unfortunately it clashes with the "high drama" style. I admire Leiber for doing it--and I am sure it would have been an utterly complete failure from any other writer--but in my opinion it isn't all successful. Standing on its own that's a style Leiber masters to perfection--but I am not too keen on it combined with the story's plot.
That's why it left me feeling oddly "Hooray" as well as "Ugh, c'mon!"... Hmmm...
That's a recommendation of sorts, I guess;-)
This is supposed to be one of Leiber's best, with a lot of philosophical stuff in the action... So I am looking forward to reading it now:-)
More later.
Okay--LATER:
I have read this book now, and I am in two minds. On the one hand it is a highly intelligent and an impressively weaved story evolving around a unique blend of philosophical ideas & "hip" 1950s/60s sci-fi; on the other it is a soap drama with loads of references to classic literature & drama.
The first part I must say is so amazing that Leiber's story has left ever-lasting impressions on my mind. And a cleverer plot device using the Einsteinean concept of Time (in philosophical language called "Static Time") is hard to imagine.
Unfortunately it clashes with the "high drama" style. I admire Leiber for doing it--and I am sure it would have been an utterly complete failure from any other writer--but in my opinion it isn't all successful. Standing on its own that's a style Leiber masters to perfection--but I am not too keen on it combined with the story's plot.
That's why it left me feeling oddly "Hooray" as well as "Ugh, c'mon!"... Hmmm...
That's a recommendation of sorts, I guess;-)
October 5, 2015
-Instantánea breve e inconexa de algo mayor, pero que tendremos que buscar en otro lugar.-
Género. Novela corta.
Lo que nos cuenta. Greta Forzane trabaja como “animadora” (formalmente, Anfitriona) en un lugar fuera del tiempo y el espacio al que acuden los soldados que luchan en el bando de las Arañas en su guerra eterna contra las Serpientes, buscando recreo y esparcimiento para recuperarse de las consecuencias de su lucha. La llegada de tres de esos soldados, reclutados en distintos momentos del tiempo y normalmente conocidos como Demonios, generará una situación inesperada y muy peligrosa. Obra conocida también como “El gran momento” y origen de la línea narrativa de La Guerra del Cambio.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com....
Género. Novela corta.
Lo que nos cuenta. Greta Forzane trabaja como “animadora” (formalmente, Anfitriona) en un lugar fuera del tiempo y el espacio al que acuden los soldados que luchan en el bando de las Arañas en su guerra eterna contra las Serpientes, buscando recreo y esparcimiento para recuperarse de las consecuencias de su lucha. La llegada de tres de esos soldados, reclutados en distintos momentos del tiempo y normalmente conocidos como Demonios, generará una situación inesperada y muy peligrosa. Obra conocida también como “El gran momento” y origen de la línea narrativa de La Guerra del Cambio.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com....
January 26, 2016
A time travel novel where we don't see any time travel, a character study with very little character, and a tense thriller with very little thrill or tension. This book is technically well done - it tells a story efficiently, but that story doesn't seem to have much of a point. It feels more like background material for a better novel.
September 5, 2016
I can appreciate the experiment in writing style, but I just couldn't get into this book.
May 28, 2019
The author’s introduction notes that he had wanted to write a story regarding “two or more warring powers” that were “big and shadowy, so you couldn’t be altogether sure which side you were fighting on and at the very best you’d have only the feeling that you were defending something bad against something worse” (2). He wanted protagonists who “would try to resign from the war and set up a little utopia, like Spartacus and his gladiators, and then find out they couldn’t, ‘for there’s no discharge from the war’” (3). His setting adopts the rule of “a Law of the Conservation of Reality, meaning that the past would resist change (temporal reluctance) and tend to work back quickly into its old course” (id.), a conservative insistence shared by Asimov’s setting in The End of Eternity--but also reflecting this author’s different political assumptions: “It still seems a plausible assumption, reflecting the tenacity of events and the difficulty of achieving anything of real significance in this cosmos—a measure of the strength of the powers that be” (id.), a positivist quiescence, maybe, thoroughly accommodated not only to the Real of the present but also to the dreams of Power for the future thereof also. The narrative bears it out: “Most of us enter the Change World with the false metaphysic that the slightest change in the past—a grain of dust misplaced—will transform the whole future” (23).
The narrative itself concerns a temporal war between two sides, one of which uses the NSDAP as a proxy as against a power that uses the soviets as its proxy. The complaint of one newly inducted soldier is that the war involves “changing our history, stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best intentioned and efficient” (19). This sort of belligerence leads to a frame for all sorts of alternate history thought experiments, which themselves become stratagems in the war: “To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city [cf. Derrida on exactly this thesis], Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key” (21). By contrast, “Rome’s newest downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the [enemy] have fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever letting pass through the hands of the [enemy] West” (22). However, Law of Conservation applies: “Note how the gap left by Rome’s collapse was filled by the imperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian can tell the difference” (23)—which is less a matter of metaphysical law and more a matter of basic historical causation: of course the superstructures implode into indistinction when the underlying economic and class structures remain in place.
Some cool observations along the way: “It’s sweet to know there’s no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can’t shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it’s great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts” (57). So, two souls war within the breast here—though be advised that the alternate history version explored by PKD in High Castle is presented as a trifling incidental here.
Recommended for those with built-in nostalgia and cynicism, satyrs from a billion years in the future, and readers going through the purgatory of decision.
The narrative itself concerns a temporal war between two sides, one of which uses the NSDAP as a proxy as against a power that uses the soviets as its proxy. The complaint of one newly inducted soldier is that the war involves “changing our history, stealing our certainties, claiming to be so blasted all-knowing and best intentioned and efficient” (19). This sort of belligerence leads to a frame for all sorts of alternate history thought experiments, which themselves become stratagems in the war: “To stabilize power in the early Mediterranean world, they have built up Crete at the expense of Greece, making Athens a ghost city [cf. Derrida on exactly this thesis], Plato a trivial fabulist, and putting all Greek culture in a minor key” (21). By contrast, “Rome’s newest downfall is directly due to the Unholy Triple Alliance the [enemy] have fomented between the Eastern Classical World, Mohammedanized Christianity, and Marxist Communism, trying to pass the torch of power futurewards by way of Byzantium and the Eastern Church, without ever letting pass through the hands of the [enemy] West” (22). However, Law of Conservation applies: “Note how the gap left by Rome’s collapse was filled by the imperialistic and Christianized Germans. Only an expert Demon historian can tell the difference” (23)—which is less a matter of metaphysical law and more a matter of basic historical causation: of course the superstructures implode into indistinction when the underlying economic and class structures remain in place.
Some cool observations along the way: “It’s sweet to know there’s no cranny of reality so narrow, no privacy so intimate or sacred, no wall of was or will be strong enough, that we can’t shoulder in. Knowledge is a glamorous thing, sweeter than lust or gluttony or the passion of fighting and including all three, the ultimate insatiable hunger, and it’s great to be Faust, even in a pack of other Fausts” (57). So, two souls war within the breast here—though be advised that the alternate history version explored by PKD in High Castle is presented as a trifling incidental here.
Recommended for those with built-in nostalgia and cynicism, satyrs from a billion years in the future, and readers going through the purgatory of decision.
December 29, 2019
A short, well-conceived time travel scenario, larger in scale than other time adventure stories I've read, with a compelling narrator and some unexpected fantasy creature interactions. Overall, a solid Leiber production. His work is cinematic and more flexible than other Golden Age of science fiction authors. By that I mean that you can enter his body of work almost anywhere and feel at home. At least, I felt myself wondering what the big deal was the first time I read other authors in that group. With Leiber, I felt an affinity. Not an all-encompassing, powerful affinity, but a comfortable one.
There is a war going on between the spiders and snakes. The definitions of those creatures are not what you expect. You can expect to have a good time with alternate histories, and it is an easy, light, enjoyable read.
There is a war going on between the spiders and snakes. The definitions of those creatures are not what you expect. You can expect to have a good time with alternate histories, and it is an easy, light, enjoyable read.
September 9, 2022
Party girls at the end of the universe? For some reason I had been under the impression this was this great military sci-fi novella about soldiers across time and space. But instead it’s more like a very dated Tom Stoppard play about post war identity and changing gender norms. The effects of WW2 are deeply felt, there’s some atomic age anxiety, and this is a time when women’s lib would be gaining traction. So there’s a lot of “maybe women can be more than nurses and escorts?”. It’s trying to come to a reasonable conclusion, but the premise is beyond dated. And in that sense it’s very much a book of it’s time. It’s interesting in a post-modern drama kind of way, but the setting is deliberately abstract, and it’s really more of a late 50s time capsule than any kind of adventure.
May 15, 2022
THE BIG TIME
A-MAZ-ING. Time travel, mystery, different timelines of events. Change Winds. I thought I’ll give my eyes a break and listen to this one on audio. Well, I had to rewind and rewind and read it at the same time to understand the complexities. Not an easy read for me, but super creative and totally absorbing.
If you want something different and fantastical and with a thoughtful message, this book is the one for you. At least it was for me. Published in 1958. Old stuff can be pretty amazing. 😎
A-MAZ-ING. Time travel, mystery, different timelines of events. Change Winds. I thought I’ll give my eyes a break and listen to this one on audio. Well, I had to rewind and rewind and read it at the same time to understand the complexities. Not an easy read for me, but super creative and totally absorbing.
If you want something different and fantastical and with a thoughtful message, this book is the one for you. At least it was for me. Published in 1958. Old stuff can be pretty amazing. 😎
Displaying 1 - 30 of 450 reviews