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    The Big Time
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    The Big Time
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    The Big Time
    Ebook148 pages2 hours

    The Big Time

    By Fritz Leiber

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This Hugo Award winning novel dripped from the pen of master author Fritz Leiber, and was originall published in two parts in the pulp magazine, Galaxy Science Fiction in March and April of 1958. This is a classic work of time travel, pitting two warring factions, both with the ability to travel through time against one another in a tapestry of changed events and altnernate futures.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCrossroad Press
    Release dateNov 18, 2010
    ISBN9781452350127
    Author

    Fritz Leiber

    Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was the highly acclaimed author of numerous science fiction stories and novels, many of which were made into films. He is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won many awards, including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

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    Reviews for The Big Time

    3.5/5

    11 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      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]

    • 5/5
      I can't think of a better way to start off the Hugo's than this story. Set in The Piano Bar at the End of the Universe, this is a simple, short book that left me feeling completely decompressed from some of the extremely dense books I've been reading lately while still being excited for science fiction. The incorporation of strange technologies and aliens reminded me of the feeling I get when I'm watching a good Star Trek episode, one where they aren't trying to technobabble a science-y explanation, but are simply using technology as a rhetorical tool to bring together elements that could not otherwise exist in the same place. There is no need to explain exactly what "Inversion" does in The Big Time, it is being completely shut away from the cosmos and that is all we need to know.
    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      Part of my plan this year (my 49th on this earth) is to read books that I started but never finished. I took this book on a family vacation when I was 16 and got stuck somewhere in the first five pages. Reading it this time, I could see why...it took me probably 20 pages (in a very short novel) to get the characters and setting straight in my head. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed it by the end. It made me yearn for some more science fiction of that vintage. (This was a 1958 Hugo Award Winner.)
    • 2/5
      A story which looks at time travel from outside time, and the possible consequences of deliberate interference with event with the intent of manipulating the future. The protagonists are all actors in a war being waged across time, by two ill-defined groups known as the spiders and snakes.The war setting is typical of 1960s SF, where the cold war and its various hot proxies in Vietnam and elsewhere were inescapable realities which affected much fiction. To me, this was very much a book of its time. I found the prose a bit laboured, and the story ultimately unengaging. I've greatly enjoyed some of Fritz Leiber's short stories, most memorably "Gonna Roll the Bones", but this book didn't provide anything like the same sort of enjoyment. It won a Hugo, and maybe that means it was more striking at the time it was written than now, some 40 years later. Certainly there are many ideas and devices that set it apart from the fiction of the time - a female narrator, aliens from the past as well as the future - but they aren't enough to rescue it now for me.
    • 4/5
      I liked the first two thirds of this short cold war novel quite a bit, but felt a bit let down by the ending. It certainly has a very different feel from your normal scifi yarn, telling the tale of what happens to a limited cast of characters trapped in a single room (outside of time and space) over the course of a few hours. Indeed, it has the feeling a an ensemble play (which might have worked even better with a bit smaller cast of better defined characters)..
    • 3/5
      Just barely makes it into the "worth reading" pile ... but you have to get beyond the dated writing style and casual misogyny ... and it's really more of a novella based on its length.