Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time

Fritz Leiber’s novel The Big Time was published in 1958. It’s the beginning of his Change War series which comprises this novel and and seven short stories.

This is a wild complex unconventional time travel story. Two warring factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, are trying to change the past in order to further their agendas. Those agendas are unknown.

Changing the past is possible, but extremely difficult. The Spiders might prevent the First World War by preventing the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand only to find that the war breaks out anyway six months later over some totally different issue. So then you have to change something else. And that might lead to other changes that you didn’t want. So you have to keep endlessly tinkering, and the other side (the Snakes) are tinkering as well to produce outcomes that you don’t want.

Soldiers are recruited from both the past and the future to make these changes happen. Mostly (but not always) they are recruited at the moment of their deaths and they undergo a kind of resurrection.

The novel takes place entirely in the Place. This is a kind of rest and recuperation centre that is outside of the cosmos (space-time). The Entertainers, including the narrator Greta, help the Soldiers to recover from their physical and emotional wounds. The Soldiers are provided with the things that Soldiers like when they’re on leave - basically booze and women.

Soldiers and Entertainers are Doublegangers (they can operate in the cosmos and outside of it) and Demons (they are more or less alive in both the cosmos and outside it). At least it’s better than being a Zombie (those whose timelines are entirely in the past) or an Unborn (those whose timelines are entirely in the future).

The staff of the Place comprises three men and three women, plus a vast supply of Ghostgirls. Three Soldiers arrive. Pairing off takes place and then things start to get weird and exciting. Finding an atomic bomb on the premises can do that. And they lose the machine that allows them to pass back and forth from the cosmos to the Place. That means they’re trapped. Everyone blames everybody else.

Leiber had a theatrical background and The Big Time is like a play that takes place entirely on a single set. Momentous things are happening, but they’re all happening offstage. Leiber focuses on the effects those events have on this small group of people.

Leiber is interested in what happens to the personality when somebody is totally unmoored from his own time. In this case of these people comes from a billion years in the past, from a long-lost lunar civilisation. Knowing that you entire civilisation disappeared into oblivion a billion years ago is not exactly easy to deal with. Another is from a billion years in the future - his civilisation his not yet even evolved to the point of qualifying as intelligent life.

And these characters are constantly shuttling back and forth between countless different historical eras, and when they revisit an historical era with which they are familiar it has changed anyway. Some of them have died several times.

All of this gives Leiber the chance to play around with some philosophical themes, something he was fond of doing.

This is not quite like any other science fiction novel. It’s not just the subject matter (which other authors have tackled) but the unique and unsettling tone. But then Fritz Leiber was not quite like any other science fiction writer. He had a very distinctive authorial voice.

The Big Time will play with your head, but in a good way. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Fritz Leiber’s novel You're All Alone which is also pretty wild stuff.