The Big Time
| The Big Time | |
|---|---|
 1961 Ace Double Edition Cover |
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| Author(s) | Fritz Leiber |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science Fiction |
| Publisher | Ace Books (1961 book edition), Gregg Press (1976 first hardback edition) |
| Publication date | 1958 (as a serial), 1961 (as a novel) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
The Big Time (1957) is a short science fiction novel by Fritz Leiber. It won the Hugo Award in 1958. The Big Time is a vast, cosmic back story, hidden behind a claustrophobic front story with only a few characters.
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[edit] Plot
The storyline involves two factions which both have time travel who are at war with each other. Their method of battle involves changing the outcome of events throughout history.
The two sides are nicknamed the Spiders and the Snakes. Their foot soldiers are recruited from every place and time: Cretese Amazons, Hussars, Roman legionnaires, GIs, Wehrmacht Landsers, Space Commandos, and soldiers from the armies of Napoleon, Stalin, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great may find themselves fighting side-by-side or on opposite sides. Likewise medical staff and entertainers are drawn into the temporal war to provide rest and relaxation for battle weary combatants.
The Change War and the soldiers fighting in it do not know how it began or if it has an end. They also do not know the true form or identity of the Spiders or the Snakes. No one knows how those nicknames were chosen, or whether they are in any way accurate.
The action of the story takes place at a rest and relaxation base between the changing time lanes. The plot takes the form of a locked room mystery.
[edit] Publication
The Big Time was originally published in two parts in Galaxy Magazine's March and April 1958 issues illustrated by Virgil Finlay. It has many subsequent reprints in book form.
[edit] Reception
Algis Budrys praised The Big Time as evidence that Leiber was the only sf writer of his generation "who as a matter of course and conviction saw through the mores and circumstances which are now proving nonviable not only in commercial literature but in what we can call life as well."[1]
[edit] Influences
Leiber's short story "Try and change the past", also from 1958, is laid in the same universe. It features a New York man just recruited by the Snakes going AWOL and trying to change his personal past in which he was murdered by his wife, finding out that the universe resists all his efforts and "conserving reality" in various improbable ways, and finally having no choice but going back to fight in the Time War.
In 1965, Poul Anderson took up the same theme, a time war fought between two powerful factions who confront each other throughout time and use people of past periods as their pawns, in "The Corridors of Time".
[edit] References
- ^ "Galaxy Bookshelf", Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1967, pp.190=91
[edit] External links
- The Big Time at Project Gutenberg (Digital transcription of serialized version)
- The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, reviewed by Ted Gioia (Conceptual Fiction)
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