The Big Time

Say you're about to die in a few minutes, maybe, like our narrator Greta Forzane, after ten minutes of being raped to death by soldiers of a Third Reich that goes from the salt mines of Siberia to the cornfields of Iowa. And then you are offered an opportunity to escape your fate - an opportunity no one ever refuses. Of course, you have to enroll with the Spiders or the Snakes, become a Demon in their eternal Change War, a vast cosmic struggle across millions of years to change history to ... well, no one is really sure what the war's point is. You just serve your side as a Soldier or an Entertainer.

Greta's an Entertainer, one of the staff in the Place, a zone outside of regular time and space, an R&R stop for the Soldiers back from show more missions to terminate the Roman Empire early, nuke Ancient Crete, or kidnap a baby Einstein. History is a stubborn, hard thing to change. And, if you succeed, there's always the blowback of the Change Winds which may you take you into nonexistence.

Part party girl, part song and dance trouper, part sex therapist and comfort woman, she has a thing for Sid, former contemporary of Shakespeare - when duty doesn't have her attending to Nazi soldier boyfriend Erich. Her co-workers are Beau, formerly of a Great South that never knew Grant's gunboats on the Mississippi, and Doc, a drunken, derelict medical officer, formerly of a Nazi occupied Czarist Russia. And then there's Maud from the 23rd Century and New Girl who seems destined to off herself in many versions of the early 20th century - until recruited.

Enter three soldiers - a Nazi, a Roman, and a casualty of Passchendaele - back from a botched mission. New Girl falls for the latter, a poet who starts suggesting something suspiciously like rebellion against their Spider masters. And then a distress call, a rescue mission for three other Soldiers - two of them aliens.

In 160 pages of story, Leiber creates and explains a world of Demons, Ghostgirls, Doublegangers, and Zombies, throws out a bunch of alternate histories, convincingly shows the psychology of those who are comfortable with the chaos of the Change War, and, ripped from normal lives, what they most miss.

Leiber puts his theatrical experience to good use. With only nine characters, one setting, and offstage action related in convincing, if sometimes poetic, dialogue, this is one classic that lives up to its billing. In fact, it's one of those rare science fiction classics that history and technological progress have not dated, not even a bit.

The book comes with an informative introduction by Leiber about the creation of the novel and the Change War series - though this story stands entirely on its own and an afterword by Robert Thurston on the theatrical elements of the novel. show less

I read this in my early teens and was crushingly disappointed by it. I knew enough about sf to know that for a novel to win a Hugo was a Big Thing, I'd read Isaac Asimov's first anthology of Hugo-winning shorts, I'd read a few Hugo-winning novels that had pinned me gasping to my seat . . . and yet this novel I'd picked up and hurried home with eagerly because of the big HUGO WINNER on the cover was a slight little thing, staged entirely in a single room and its antechambers, narrated in a quirky fashion, and with not a lot going on of yer actual dramatic action. Galaxies remained unspanned, gobs unsmacked.

So I was a little nervous when I picked up The Big Time again after an elapse of, gawdelpus, nearly half a century. This time show more around the novel's slenderness struck me as one of its major appeals . . .

. . . and then I read it, and discovered at last why it's absolutely right that this book should have won a Hugo -- in fact, it's depressing the book was published at a time when the ghetto walls around sf were tall and strong, because really the novel deserved wider recognition than a Hugo could offer.

Greta Forzane is an "Entertainer" in The Place, a Recuperation Station, one of a number of Places where troops go for R&R in between tours of duty as they fight the Change War, the war between the Spiders and the Snakes that's waged by altering history in order to effect desirable changes in the future. The troops -- and ancillary personnel like Greta -- are recruited ("Resurrected") by being plucked out of their lives in the Little Time soon before their deaths and brought into the Big Time, which is the amorphous spatiotemporal region that's outside spacetime and via which it's possible to travel immediately from one point in the Little Time's chronology to another. (One of the possibilities the denizens of the Big Time especially dread is Change Death, which happens when a change in history shifts the moment of your death to a point before that of your "Resurrection".) Making desirable changes to history is not as easy as you might think, because, as Leiber explains in his Introduction to the 1982 Collier edition (the SFBC version of which is the one I read),

I assumed 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, and you'd have to go back and make many little changes, sometimes over and over again, before you could get a really big change going [. . .:] It still seems to me 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. (p3)

Into The Place, which has something of the Blue Angel about it, tumble one day three weary temporal soldiers -- a Nazi officer, Erich (who is Greta's occasional lover and who beats her), a Roman legionnaire (whom she also knows) and a stranger, an English poet who met his death in WWI. While they are still settling in for their R&R, another trio arrives: a centaur, a creature from the moon when the moon was civilized millions of years ago, and a Minoan warrior princess . . . bearing with them what proves to be a 1950s atom bomb. One of Greta's fellow-Entertainers falls in love with the poet, whose work she has adored all her life and whose tragically early death in the trenches has always made him seem yet more romantic. While the principals are discussing various surprisingly interesting existential matters ("Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos?" -- p 65), one of their number switches off and hides the Major Maintainer, the gadget that maintains The Place in its correct relationship with not just the rest of the Big Time but the rest of all reality. The cast (a term I use because the novel reads in some ways like a stage play) could be trapped here in isolation forever. Yet, since The Place is only one big room and a couple of secondary ones, where -- and how -- could the Major Maintainer have been hidden in such a fashion that even the most painstaking search fails to reveal it?

Minds are concentrated when Erich, the sociopathic Nazi, arms the atom bomb so that it'll detonate within half an hour. The only way to escape the blast would seem to be to locate the Major Maintainer and then, reconnected to the rest of reality once more, sling the device out of The Place before it can explode. In other words, the characters' survival depends on their ability to solve what's a fairly distinguished locked-room mystery. (The solution, when it finally appears, is one that John Dickson Carr would have been pleased with.)

As noted above, the Change War is being waged between the Spiders and the Snakes. No one knows what the purpose of the war is, or what result could possibly constitute victory for one side of the other. None of the cast, although their nominal allegiance is with the Spiders, have ever met a Spider, and certainly they've never met a Snake; they have no idea, in fact, who or what the Spiders and Snakes are. To most of the characters, especially the soldiers, this barely matters: they loudly detest the Snakes, have great loyalty toward the Spiders. Exceptions are Greta herself, with whose thoughts we grow most acquainted since she's our narrator, and the poet, Bruce, who is likewise, as a poet, introspective. It's Bruce who, in an impassioned oration to the others, spells out the reality of war as it affects ordinary soldiers and civilians:

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. (p63)

Now, of course, I have to try to lay hands on Leiber's spinoff shorter Change War pieces: "Try and Change the Past", "Damnation Morning", "The Oldest Soldier", "Knight to Move" and "No Great Magic". show less

Well! This is a weird one. There's a whole rich backstory about two mysterious factions called the "Snakes" and "Spiders" that are fighting a crosstime "Change War" with the whole of history as their backdrop and dangerous dudes drawn from all eras, past and future as their soldiers. Each of them is simultaneously mounting some near-infinitude of missions to alter how it is/was/will be and put themselves in charge across a timestream that is trying to knit itself back together and preserve its logic even though one minute the Nazis are in Cleveland and the next the Horgons are on Glovax 7. But none of that intrudes here, not really; instead, we get a bunch of "Soldiers" on furlough and their "Entertainers" trying to soothe their show more screaming psyches and philosophizing and machinating against one another in their different ways to escape from under the thumb of their masters/cause death on a cosmic scale/have a rollicking Elizabethan adventure in outer space/punch out the guy who stole their lady/find out what's really going on here/etc. It all goes on in some kind of crazyphysics lounge at the end of the universe, and people embody Nietzschean and existential ideas in different ways and there is an a-bomb. All this in 135 pages. I understood about as much as I enjoyed, which was a reasonable amount I'd say. show less

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 show more 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! :) show less

A Riff on Time, War, and Existence

Fritz Leiber was a man of many skills and trades, among them brilliant student who graduated from the University of Chicago, minor roles in theater and film (he was the child of Shakespearean actors), and writer. His novel The Big Time appeared first in Galaxy Magazine. Though having only appeared in the magazine, it won the 1958 Hugo for best science fiction novel. Later, in 1962, Ace Books published it in book form, and the Library of America has included in its classic science fiction volumes.

The Big Time is as much a philosophical query into the nature of life, the effects of perpetual war, external life, love, and cynicism about pretty much everything, as it is about time travel and the disruption show more of the time line. In the novel, Leiber introduces his Law of the Conservation of Reality, which states that changed time will eventually return to its forgone timeline, and that the only way to change time permanently is to effect many small changes in time over the course of the timeline. This is what the Change War, the backdrop for the novel, is all about. Two cosmic factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, wage war on an epic scale, across time and space, on all the inhabited planets, from the start of time to the end of it. For their troops, they resurrect people from all eras, team them up, and send them off on missions to change events. For example, we learn that the Nazis have won WWII and rule most of the world, including the U.S.

The novel itself transpires in a more finite space and time, a few hours in a way station know as The Place. It’s a combination recuperation field hospital and entertainment venue for soldiers finishing a mission and on their way to another. The story begins when three soldiers pass through the door and begin mingling with the staff, among them four women, one of whom serves as the narrator, Greta. Over the course of their hours together, they argue about war, about rebelling and trying to effect peace, and about just retiring and returning to a normal life. To sharpen the arguments and introduce a bit of urgency and theater, Leiber introduces an A-bomb into The Place and has one of the characters start it ticking, giving the occupants only thirty minutes to avoid oblivion.

As mentioned, Leiber was an intellect and Shakespearean and both show in this novel. The meditations prove weighty and the dialogues between characters not only are jammed with literary allusions, references, and palaver in the slang of the time, but also Shakespearean prose, German, and Latin. Perhaps, then, not for everybody, but definitely for sci-fi readers who like their imaginations stimulated and challenged, often all in the same sentence. show less

A Riff on Time, War, and Existence

Fritz Leiber was a man of many skills and trades, among them brilliant student who graduated from the University of Chicago, minor roles in theater and film (he was the child of Shakespearean actors), and writer. His novel The Big Time appeared first in Galaxy Magazine. Though having only appeared in the magazine, it won the 1958 Hugo for best science fiction novel. Later, in 1962, Ace Books published it in book form, and the Library of America has included in its classic science fiction volumes.

The Big Time is as much a philosophical query into the nature of life, the effects of perpetual war, external life, love, and cynicism about pretty much everything, as it is about time travel and the disruption show more of the time line. In the novel, Leiber introduces his Law of the Conservation of Reality, which states that changed time will eventually return to its forgone timeline, and that the only way to change time permanently is to effect many small changes in time over the course of the timeline. This is what the Change War, the backdrop for the novel, is all about. Two cosmic factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, wage war on an epic scale, across time and space, on all the inhabited planets, from the start of time to the end of it. For their troops, they resurrect people from all eras, team them up, and send them off on missions to change events. For example, we learn that the Nazis have won WWII and rule most of the world, including the U.S.

The novel itself transpires in a more finite space and time, a few hours in a way station know as The Place. It’s a combination recuperation field hospital and entertainment venue for soldiers finishing a mission and on their way to another. The story begins when three soldiers pass through the door and begin mingling with the staff, among them four women, one of whom serves as the narrator, Greta. Over the course of their hours together, they argue about war, about rebelling and trying to effect peace, and about just retiring and returning to a normal life. To sharpen the arguments and introduce a bit of urgency and theater, Leiber introduces an A-bomb into The Place and has one of the characters start it ticking, giving the occupants only thirty minutes to avoid oblivion.

As mentioned, Leiber was an intellect and Shakespearean and both show in this novel. The meditations prove weighty and the dialogues between characters not only are jammed with literary allusions, references, and palaver in the slang of the time, but also Shakespearean prose, German, and Latin. Perhaps, then, not for everybody, but definitely for sci-fi readers who like their imaginations stimulated and challenged, often all in the same sentence. show less

After failing to hand out a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1957, the voters stepped up and handed the 1958 award to Fritz Leiber's short novel The Big Time. The novel, detailing the events in "The Place", a rest stop for weary soldiers participating in the Cosmos-wide "Change War" that rages through all of time and space as the alien Spiders and Snakes vie to control the ultimate outcome of history, is a study in paradoxes. A war story about survival told by a dead noncombatant, The Big Time is about a war as large as the entirety of space and time that takes place in a space smaller than your typical bar and grill over a period of a couple of hours. It is a time-travel story in which no one ever travels through time, and a locked door show more mystery in which the door is only locked when the crime has been committed.

The basic background of the book is fairly straightforward: two factions are vying through time and space for control of the outcome to be determined at the end of time. These factions are never seen and are merely referred to by the monikers "Snakes" and "Spiders", and even those names are just labels and no one knows if they are in any way accurate descriptions of the two sides. The characters in the story all work for the Spiders, who are presumed to be the "good" side, although there is no way for either the characters or the reader to really know. The Spiders, and presumably the Snakes, recruit their soldiers by whisking away people on death's door and offering them a place in their ranks as an alternative to dying. Once a recruit accepts, they become an immortal "demon" and taken away to "The Big Time", where they exist outside of the normal flow of time and immune to the alterations of history that are engendered by the Change War. The difficulty both sides face in waging the Change War is that time is "sticky", observing the Law of Conservation of Time. In other words, even if you make changes in time, it will tend to converge back to its original outcome, so any changes one makes have to be reinforced many times to make them permanent, or else history will eventually simply drift back to the original (presumably undesirable) end. As a result, soldiers are sent out on mission after mission in order to make sure that the their tinkering with the world will hold, and they experience dozens upon dozens of realities - and we, who are not demons from the Big Time do as well, but as memories or shadows that we can't quite place, an effect which is used to explain phenomena such as déjà vu and precognition.

Once recruited, a demon becomes either a soldier to be sent on missions to try to bend the flow of time to the outcome desired by the Spiders, or an entertainer assigned to one of the out of time rest areas where the soldiers recuperate between missions. The story of The Big Time takes place in one of these rest areas and is told from the perspective of entertainer Greta Forzane, whose job appears to be serving food and drinks, dancing, singing, and providing other more personal services to the soldiers who drop in. And this perspective gives the story a somewhat surreal quality: although Forzane is a demon, and has an understanding of the Change War, she has never experienced it directly, having spent most of her time since her "death" in the same confined space waiting for those who are doing the real fighting to come back. One element more or less unremarked upon in the story is the bleak nature of the lives of the entertainers in the story. While the soldiers presumably undergo harrowing experiences on their missions to the outside world, they at least get to do different things while enjoying a change of scenery when they are carrying out their orders. The entertainers, on the other hand, spend all of their time in a confined space and do essentially the same thing over and over again. And because they are effectively immortal, they can look forward to repeating this dreary routine until the heat death of the universe. From a certain perspective, this seems like a fate worse than death, and it is this realization that makes the actions that precipitate the central crisis of the book understandable.

And the Spiders' method of recruitment makes for some strange bedfellows: the three "hussars" who show up consist of Mark - a former Roman soldier, Bruce - a British casualty from Passchendale who fancies himself a poet, and Erich - a brutish Nazi officer from a Third Reich that had conquered the United States. Later, an even more unlikely trio shows up consisting of a female warrior from ancient Minos, an alien from an even more ancient version of Earth's moon, and another alien from our distant future. But when the reader gets the snippets of information they mention when they are swapping soldier tales of poisoning Churchill and Cleopatra or kidnapping infant Einstein, one starts to wonder if the Spiders' goals are beneficial for humanity. And at that point, one comes to the realization that in a war that spans time and space, what might be required for the goals of the Spiders to come to fruition (even if they are ultimately benign) could be a policy that consigns some or all of humanity to live under terrible regimes, or that requires the learning and achievements of figures such as Plato or Kepler should be erased from history's record. Despite the importance to humans of the events that affect humanity, the lesson given by the existence of the Lunan Ilhilihis is that everything we hold dear is both ephemeral and a matter of trivial importance of the Spiders. We are, in effect, a minor sideshow in a minor theater of a great war.

Which is why, when what appears to be one of the most thoughtful characters begins to question his role and the role of the others in "The Place", the paranoia displayed by the others in the story seems vastly overblown. When Bruce begins to question the place the soldiers and entertainers in the story hold in the war, several of the others find his comments treasonous and begin to fear retribution from their Spider masters. But this fear seems quite misplaced, as it seems likely that their Spider masters pay almost no attention to their doings in the war. But because their actions are important to the characters in the story, they assume they must be important to their commanders. It is this sense of self-importance that leads to the crisis that creates the overt conflict in the book. And although the resolution of the conflict is interesting and satisfying, it seems as though that the story is just a framework to hang the real point upon - which seems to be reinforced when, after being out of contact with the outside world for a while, the denizens of 'the Place" are returned to contact with the rest of the Big Time, and no one outside their little circle seems to notice. The deafening silence from the Spiders and the Snakes leads one to begin to wonder if there is any substance to the Change War at all. Though this question is never spoken directly, it seems possible that the War may simply be a hellish afterlife that the unfortunates in the story have been consigned to. Or perhaps it is all true and the Spiders and Snakes are fighting a brutal battle for control of the outcome of history. But the characters have no way of knowing what is true and what is not, so they must simply struggle on as best they can as if what they believe to be true is actually true.

And it is this layering that makes this book a worthy Hugo winner. Although the book has some flaws - much of it is written in fairly stylized language, and it contains the healthy dose of the casual sexism that is typically on display in so many books written in the 1950s and earlier - the direct story, amounting to a well-written locked door mystery, and the underlying story, concerning the nature of reality and loyalty, are both gripping and thought-provoking. With a time travel story full of mystery and ambiguity, The Big Time is a must read for any science fiction fan.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds show less