Customer Reviews

Big Time

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

As I march my way through all the Hugo & Nebula winners I came upon this book. The only other Lieber works I've read have been the very likable Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series...a fantasy staple. The Big Time is definately an original piece of time travel fiction, yet there is actually no time travel involved in the book. The prose is light on narrative and very heavy on dialogue. I had little to work with in visualizing the surroundings (basically a large room) in which the characters interacted the entire time. Despite this, I did enjoy it for the most part; although once again I am left a little baffled by the ending (a la Babel-17 by Delany). As someone else pointed out (who I agree with) this book reads like a stage play, and could easily be turned into a strange, yet tense, psuedo-time travel suspense. It's a quick read. If you want to hit all the "classics" and can find a copy, go for it. If you're a casual sci-fi reader, I recommend you skip it.

A book that deals with time travel in a way beyond anything I've seen before or since. Leiber sees time travel ability as a step in the development of the species, and puts that little philosophical gem into this tight little piece. Not quite a novel (it really does read like a stage play) this actually ends up as a bit of a whodunnit.

Characters put the next stage of human development in the context of ordinary human foibles and frailties, and as always Leiber is able to slip in some big ideas without adding slack to the plot. Lord knows there are lots of authors who could have ladeled on a hundred more pages of lard.

Yes, if your idea of a time travel story is one more adventure of Biff Beefwhacker battling it out with ancient giant ratbeasts, then this will disappoint. If you think the time travel episodes of Star Trek make perfect sense, this will probably hurt your head. But if you want a tightly written, thoughtful, taut, tense, small scale adventure with large scale ideas underneath, this is your book.

It looks like every respectful science fiction writer at one point or another wrote a book on time travel. This one is by far the most original one I have read. The novel is short(about 135 pages) and it is written like a play. There is a war going on between the Spiders and Snakes and they use humans to fight it. So they take all these dead people from different time periods, ressurrect them and send them to war. Why it is fought, for what reasons, the answers are there. But to understand them, people look at themselves and the way the human society is developing. The book is very slow paced, however it is short, so the reader should not have any problems getting through it.

I first came across The Big Time as an inclusion in the compilation book Ship Of Shadows, a hard to get library copy. That was in early 1998, and I was delighted to be able to purchase the recently republished story by itself.

Like all of Fritz Leiber's work the writing is supremely articulate and the story telling carefully, and craftily constructed, holding the reader from start to finish.

The main character twenty-nine and party girl Greta Forzane, takes us through events sited in an R&R centre for battling time travellers who find themselves becalmed on The Big Time along with a counting down Atomic bomb. A book which will need careful reading to get the whole picture, but well worth it; and for that great Gertrude Steinism: 'you can't time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.'

For the price I would have liked to to get a dust cover. But whatever, writng this good is worth the shortfall in packaging.

Spiders and Snakes and A-Bombs to bake! Fritz once again proves that he could handle almost any medium, any subject with this wild tale of a time war between these two S&S organizations (and the SS is deliberate). A war that stretches from 100 million years in our past to at least as far in the future - but all the action of this tale takes place in a very confined space known simply as The Place, isolated from the Change Winds that continually blow in from the Void. A Place where time-warriors go for some rest and recuperation from the stresses of fighting and a continually changing past and future, staffed by some rather odd individuals. There's Sid, nominally in charge, a 16th century Englishman, and Greta, who died both in 1929 and in 1955 in Hitler's Greater Chicago. Then there's Maud, everybody's idea of a grandmother, Doc, who normally staggers about in extreme inebriation, and Lilli, nurse and good-time girl from WWI.

Now throw in Erich, recruited from Hitler's army, Bruce, an early 20th century Englishman, a octopoid Lunarian from 100 million years ago, a satyr from far in the future, thrown into the Place at the end of their mission, and a couple of Ghost Girls just to liven up the party. Add one A-bomb, courtesy of rescuing a failed attack mission, and a gadget that cuts off the Place from everything - not just normal time, but even Change time and the physical universe.

This is the stage setting - and it does read very much like a play (Fritz was no stranger to the theater). And from these materials Leiber constructs a fascinating set characters sharply illuminated by stress, both from the Change War and internally, as the A-bomb is triggered to go off in half an hour. Each of the characters manages to present a different perspective on life, love, war and peace, and the purpose of intelligent entities, a discourse that gets wrapped up in something of a locked room mystery story, and is enfolded by very appropriate quotes from some of the great poets and philosophers of the world. The society of these Change War denizens is sharply evoked as almost a side-discourse to the main story, a society that is rich and complex, and invites comparison to Asimov's The End of Eternity's rather sterile and compartmentalized one. There is more meat packed into the slim bones of this work than many works four times its size manage to enfold.

A riveting tale, with suspense, drama, mystery, and an overarching structure that will make you think twice (and then perhaps again): "Familiar with infinite universe sheaths and open-ended postulate systems?" -a Heinlein quote used for the last chapter. Then everything is possible, and everything has already happened. And you are caught in the middle.

This book (which clocks in at just about 35,000 words - only a novella under today's standards) won the Hugo Award for best novel of 1958, and it deserved it.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Fritz Leiber was a groundbreaker in his science fiction and horror writing of the 1940s through 1960s, and he was surely known for his satirical insights and his unique subversions of literary archetypes. But in this particular book he started with some tremendous and innovative ideas, and proceeded to create a disappointingly small and underachieving novel. The initial point of interest in this book is Leiber's very insightful twist on the basic sci-fi concepts of time travel. In a concept that hasn't been tackled deeply by too many authors, Leiber creates a universe that keeps changing as warring factions battle throughout all of history to reshape the world to their own advantage. Leiber also makes great use of the constantly altering timestreams that result from such manipulation, as characters find themselves with new histories, and even new lives, as alternate timestreams keep appearing. There is immense potential inherent in these plot devices, promising everything from an influential breakthrough in time travel writing, to characters struggling through a vortex of multiple existences, to ruminations on the futility of war.

But what does Leiber do with these vast possibilities? Sadly, almost nothing. Historians of sci-fi may recognize the fundamental weakness that flummoxed many a fine sci-fi idea in the general time period in which this book was written (1961). In a word, hipsterism. Leiber is so busy crafting creaky hipster dialogue and showing (then-)trendy characters socializing and conversing fabulously, that the reader barely notices the plot slogging along beneath. The characters in this book are annoyingly obtuse, and empathizing with them is all but impossible. The running theme of the story, about the hopelessness of war and the emotional exhaustion and factionalism of the combatants, is swamped beneath the longwinded discussions of shallow characters who talk in outdated slang terms, while facing up to their problems via cocktail parties and friendly catfights. Many of Fritz Leiber's other works are esteemed masterpieces in the various fields he tackled, and deserve a new round of recognition. But this one is a real disappointment, as huge ideas are swept aside by obtuse writing. [~doomsdayer520~]

The Place is a recuperation station outside of space and time where Spider soldiers in The Change War go for rest and relaxation between operations. This war has been going on between The Spiders and The Snakes since the beginning of time and Soldiers have been drafted (resurrected) into "The Big Time" from many points in history. From outside of time, they can plunge in at crucial moments and manipulate events to serve their cause, or they can change things ex post facto, which is why sometimes memory and history don't quite match.

All of the story happens in The Place, which is sort of like a cosmic Cheers except that it's run by an Elizabethan bard instead of a washed-up baseball player. The soldiers and entertainers at The Place spend their time drinking, dancing, singing, and discussing world events (not surprisingly for a story written in 1958, concerns about Nazis, communism, and Marxism predominate). When a life-threatening crisis suddenly occurs in The Place, the cast begins arguing, fighting, and suspecting each other.

I love Fritz Leiber and I love his concept of soldiers outside of time influencing the outcome of world events. So I was expecting to love The Big Time, which won a Hugo Award. But I didn't love it. The narrator, Suzanne Toren, is incredible -- she very successfully handles male and female voices and the accents of Germany, Rome, ancient Crete, 16th c England, 19th c "Southern Steamboat" American, and 20th c Chicago. Unfortunately, the story is told from the perspective of Greta, a 1950s Chicago party girl. Ms Toren's rendition is superb but by golly, 1950s Chicago party girl ain't that pretty. (Brother, it gets lousy awful fast, man!)

But my main issue is that almost all of The Big Time is dialogue and Greta's internal soliloquy. I did enjoy wondering along with the characters about who The Spiders and The Snakes are, when "now" is, and how much more change their patched-up threadbare reality can take (the monologues on this topic were fascinating). But I was hoping to witness the Soldiers influencing real historical events. The few parts of the book where these events were described were anachronistically wonderful. (Did you know that they almost dropped a nuclear bomb on Crete in 1300 B.C.?)

The Big Time is a concept novella which reads more like a stage play (probably why it won a Hugo). Even though I loved the concept, I would have loved it more if I'd seen it in action. And even though the audio production was perfection, by golly, I don't want to listen to another concept novel narrated by a 1950s Chicago party girl!

Go back to 1957 and try to understand a SF writer.

You are obliged by publishers to have these ridiculous book covers, usually girls in mini skirts blowing humanoid aliens to smithereens, the exact opposite of that cool Amazon cover you 're looking at.

WW II is only 12 years in the past, and somewhere in the same country you live in, Ginsberg's Howl is going through an obscenity trial.

If this is your background, which it is, The Big Time should be considered a hell of a novel. OK, Asimov's End of Eternity with a similar (but not that similar) concept came out 2 years earlier. And yes, it does read like a play. So what? Fritz Leiber gives us, in less than 150 pages, a fine cocktail of claustrophobia, ethics, philosophy, mystery and weird characters that has stood the test of time extremely well. In fact, one wonders how a "Big Change" (term in the novel for changes in history after time travel operations) that would liberate Leiber from the 1957's world and make him write, say, 50 years later, would benefit this little book. As it is, 4 stars and a special place in the pantheon of time travel novels.

The term, "The Big Time," is slang (in the reality of the eponymous book) for beings that live in 4 dimensions - the three geometrical and time. They can move freely forward and backwards in time. Two factions are vying for control of this universe, and they recruit and send soldiers through time and space to try to change the past to affect the future. Because this is a big war, change is constant, and people living in 4-dimensional reality find memories and realities slipping away and reforming.

If this sounds confusing, the novel isn't really about the Change War, it's about an R&R station supposedly safely out of the front lines. Like all good science fiction, Lieber weaves his universe around the main story, trying not to get bogged down in exposition. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite succeed (probably because the book is so short - only 130 pages!), certainly not as well as Zelazny or Brin, for example. Similarly, many of the ideas seem a little dated - the book is over 50 years old, after all. The other most notable problem is the weakness and general unlikability of the main character - a female entertainer whose job is to show "the boys" a good time when they come in from the front.

However, the book isn't really supposed to be about the story so much as the idea of living in 4-dimensions and the possibilities it invokes, like having a Nazi and a Roman legionaire in the same unit (these are the two best characters in the book). Likewise, the ending is esoteric, but well-crafted and very satisfying. It's a very quick read - but at 130 pages, it's not really worth the price tag for the casual sci fi reader. It did win the Hugo, though, so it's certainly worth reading.

This book took me completely by surprise. Fritz Leiber kept me consumed in this book by writing some very original dialogue for his characters. For example, Greta Forzane, the lead character and narrator of the story, has such a delightful way of speaking that she kept me riveted throughout the entire book. It is also one of those novels that leads the reader to the most logical conclusion; then gives an even better ending then you could hope for. Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time" will remain one of my all time favorite novels.