A book that was not what I expected, a Hugo award winner in the public domain about a war across time? Sure, I guess? but very different.
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber is an old book, and it definitely shows. However, it is not bad at all, and it kept me somewhat engaged while I read it.
This book won the Hugo award back in the 50s, and it deals with some pretty interesting concepts, mainly, a war across space and time between two factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, both altering events and bending reality for their own motives.
The story is written in first person, from the POV of Greta, an “entertainer” living in The Place, an area separated from regular time and space where soldiers go to rest and recover after the countless battles. Basically, she’s somewhat of a therapist/nurse/prostitute, under a more sanitized word, I guess.
There are other entertainers and soldiers, and they are very diverse. People from ancient Rome, or Crete, or Nazi Germany, or a future alien from Venus, or an ancient alien from the Moon, among others.
Most of the plot happens only inside this place, known as The Place, essentially, a bar/spa/hospital/brothel. The actual war and action happens off-screen, and it’s only mentioned here and there in conversations.
This took me by complete surprise, I kind of expected a grandiose epic story with a military style and timey-wimey stuff. Maybe some sort of predecessor to books like Ender’s Game, or a similar vein? What I got instead is a bunch of people giving speeches to each other and talking about their life experiences before ending up on this conflict.
At one point, The Place gets “Introverted”—completely cut off from the flow of time and space—with no way out. To make matters worse, an atomic bomb is set to explode in half an hour. So, the story becomes a bit of a detective story trying to figure out who did it, and trying to reverse this mess.
This was a very interesting book, but it was really hard to understand, the structure of the sentences, the accent of some of the characters. it was almost incomprehensible, and instead of going word by word, I found myself reading the beggining and end of each paragraph, trying to make sense of what the middle implied based on the context.
Most of the book is dialogue or internal thoughts, there is not a lot of action going on. It was an interesting writing decision, mentioning some incredible events that could probably be their own whole novel, in just a few sentences, or even a one-liner.
Like, the implications of time travel, Nazi Germany winning the war, Greece not being the center of humanities and philosophy of its time, and similar changes with lots of ramifications throughout history, they just happened, there’s that, that’s it.
The intricacies behind how the characters ended up there in the first place, taken away from their original time streams in different ways, some even multiple times. The mystery behind the two sides of the war, who are they even fighting for, is there a point to it all? I think it’s crazy how many things are going on and simply left aside, I am not even dissapointed, those were conscious decisions that I kind of respect for the sake of telling the story the author wanted to tell.
At the time most writers liked to justify the rationale behind their sci-fi stories, some including equations and proofs of how everything worked, logic and hard science. The Big Time is much more trippy and doesn’t really feature any geniuses. If it wasn’t because of the dated language I would have enjoyed it a lot more.
Something that helped a bit was the LibriVox audiobook, thanks to that I could understand some words and know how to pronunciate them. I tried to read and listen at the same time but I ended up drifting behind as soon as some new word showed up and I had to look it up. Listening at night before sleep to the chapters I had read throughout the day proved better than reading along.
I’m happy to have given this one a try, it had been on my mind for many years because it seemed like a cool concept for its time. It may not have lived to my expectations but I think it’s worth a try anyway, definitely a unique take on the concept.
Here are my notes and media consumed from June 10 to 16, 2025! Family visits continue, video gaming esssays, progress on the same games, and some work shenanigans.
