The novel “The Big Time” by Fritz Leiber was published for the first time in 1957 and won the Hugo Award in 1958 as the best novel. It’s freely available on the Project Gutenberg site and on the ManyBooks site.
“The Big Time” is the main work of the cycle of the Change War, a fight between two factions called Spiders and Snakes that use the time travel to alter history in their favor.
Fighters are recruited in any place and time and aren’t necessarily humans: for example among them there are also Lunans, ancient aliens that lived on the Moon which was once inhabitable until a few hundred million years ago a terrible nuclear war made it sterile and dotted with craters as we know it today.
The novel is set in the Place, a base of the Spider outside of space-time where fighters can come and have some fun between missions. One day that looks the same as countless others in a place where the measure of time is completely artificial is turned into a tragedy when soldiers arrive taking with them a portable nuclear bomb.
Tension rises even more when the device that holds the base anchored to space-time disappears severing contacts with the universe at the risk of getting lost forever. Surely someone has removed the device from its place, but who is the saboteur and how did he or she hide the equipment in a small base?
“The Big Time” is a unique novel: completely set in the Place, it’s structured like a stage play where the characters tell their stories and face each other. Even the language used by the characters is very theatrical with a way of constructing sentences and using words very different from what you can hear in a bar, assuming that it’s possible to establish what kind of language people from any place and time would use when they meet.
Fritz Leiber grew up in the theater and for a period he was an actor. The influence of theater on the author is big on this novel and in other stories as well.
My edition includes the story of the 1963 “No Great Magic” where some of the Spiders who appear in “The Big Time” are on a mission and use a theater company as a cover for their mission. Well, if the theatrical metaphor of the novel wasn’t clear to someone in this story it’s really explicit!
This story is freely available on the Project Gutenberg site and the ManyBooks site too.
Today the possibilities and paradoxes of time travel have been extensively explored but in the ’50s the subject was still room for development. Fritz Leiber anticipated “Doctor Who” in describing history not as a fixed progression of events but, as the Doctor would say, more like a ball of wibley-wobbley timey-wimey stuff.
Every mission of one of the two warring factions can lead to the deletion or restoration, but maybe with a different history, of entire nations. Even the fighters, should they return to their places and times of origin, wouldn’t recognize them any longer because the various interferences have changed them.
“The Big Time” isn’t an easy novel to read precisely because of its special structure and can probably be fully appreciated only by science fiction fans who also are familiar with theater. As this is a novel that by today’s standards is short I think it’s worth reading it to try to appreciate its sophisticated style and story.
