For a novel about a group of Time Warriors trapped in a box outside of spacetime, this was surprisingly inane.

The blame for that has to go to Leiber's decision to tell the story using the first-person perspective of 29-year old female entertainer (read: brothel worker) from Chicago. To his credit, he maintains the perspective convincingly; the problem is that it's annoying. The characters are also given to speechifying, which doesn't help, and having each character speak in the manner of their "home time" is amusing at first, but soon makes it clear why pidgins occur organically.

The story itself? Well, the Time War is a mystery to those involved in it, the creatures running the war are pretty hands-off, and the effects of living outside of time are given Names (e.g. Change Death), but not actually decribed. So you're not given much to work with, in terms of good ideas about time travel, and as a result you're stuck with a story about a group of people stuck in a small room. They talk, they fight, they talk, they make up, etc. ( )

Interesting to read this 60 years after it was published in 1958.

It has the same "everyone in a room" setup as Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" or Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life", but it also has some of the exuberance and no-rules writing that was showing up in Beat Generation literature. It feels closer to 1960's Delany than to other 1950's SF.

This book is about time travel, but it is a much darker take than anything else I've read. Two shadowy groups are warring about the future by hacking the past, and history is changing beyond recognition for the people in the book, caught in the middle.

Compare that to another 1958 time travel book, Heinlein's "Door into Summer". That is tremendously readable, but pretty thin in terms of ideas. It feels really dated today. Leiber's book is just as crazy as when first published.

Don't expect it to be as good as Hitchcock, Saroyan, or Delany, but 99% of literature isn't. The dialog and characters have that great 1950's genre smell. Read it for a short wild ride that was well before its time. And narrated by a woman, imagine that.

The Standard eBooks edition of this is nice, once you figure out how to get those onto your e-reader. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fritz-leiber/the-big-time ( )

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 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.

( )

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 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.

( )

I love to read some SF classics every once in a while, and Leiber never disappoints. While the style and language definitely reflect the time in which it was written, I think this story holds up pretty well. Although all the action takes place in one "Place", it's an engaging and fast-moving read (or listen; this was the audiobook version, excellently narrated by Suzanne Torren). Highly recommended if you want to try some older SF. ( )