The Big Time

This is way out there sci-fi. It has a number of pioneering sci-fi concepts - a time war, everyone lives in a place outside time with the ability to change time. Characters muse as to the meaning of it all, who's going to win, are we losing? where are our orders coming from? why are we fighting it? can we make peace?Sounds great doesn't it? It's not.Rather than any real character development, the majority of the text is filled with simple descriptions of what all the characters are doing at any one time e.g. Sid was sitting in a corner, singing to himself, others were sitting at the bar drinking - boring and not taking the plot anywhere. The plot seems paper thin and doesn't really go anywhere just meanders along without any real focus. It's all set in one room and is often hard to follow anyway.It just isn't entertaining.I can only imagine it won the Hugo for it's ground-breaking concepts, because as a story, it's a dud.

I admit that Fritz Leiber is one of my favourite authors, but at the same time his works are a bit difficult to comprehend at times. I found myself rereading parts of the book again and again, which is not helped by the fact that particular explanations about some plot elements are deferred until a bit later from the time you first encounter.I am not sure if I'd put this on the same level as Gather Darkness, but it's still a great book which I'd recommend in a heartbeat.

Normally he writes wonderfully with a light humorous touch . In this one he seems to have delved deep into his ancestral German elephantine sense of humour. Whatever interesting ideas it contains are trodden down and flattened by this.

I’m currently reading the Hugo award winners, beginning at it’d inception and working through. Such an awful writing style not least because it’s in first person but it’s just erratic and everywhere, minimal description too. I would give this book less than 1 star if I could. How it’s a winner of the Hugo award (let alone even nominated) is truly beyond me and baffles my tiny brain.

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.