Fritz Leiber's The Big Time is his Hugo award winning epic of the Change war, that has influenced series as diverse as Star Trek: Enterprise and Doctor Who
Fritz Reuter Leiber, jr. (1910 -- 1992) was the son of a Shakespearean actor whose career spanned more than half a century, and who wrote science fiction, heroic fantasy and every shade of horror imaginable.
If James Patrick Kelly's Burn is the longest novella to ever win a major award, Leiber's 1958 Hugo winner The Big Time must be the shortest novel -- it is actually shorter than Burn.
In Leiber's Change War, two sides known as the Spiders and the Snakes have fought a war to change and re-change history for the last million years, and the next million as well. The soldiers are recruited from all generations, races and countries, whether on the eve of their death or from decades before. Their unseen masters inevitably have them shown all their possible futures, as one of the protagnists -- Lily -- poignantly recounts, and only the greats are unable to be recruited.
The Big Time is set on a Recuperation Station staffed by three 'hostesses' including narrator Greta Forzane, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Chicago, and three men; a Southern paddle-steamer captain, Sidney Lessingham, a minor contemporary of Shakespeare, and Doc, a drunken Soviet.
Three soldiers arrive needing rest and recuperation. They include a roman soldier, a British war poet of World War I, and Erich von Hohenwald, sometime boyfriend of Greta and one of the garrison occupying Chicago. There is clear tension between Briton and German, not just from their mission, and this is exacerbated by the presence of Lily, who clearly hero worships the poet.
When three more soldiers arrive, bringing with them a tactical atomic bomb for the next mission off-station, the tension escalates into open insurrection. The maintainer that pins their station to the Void and stops them dissipating into nothingness disappears, and Erich triggers the bomb, which is due to detonate in thirty minutes.
Somehow, the disparate elements must make peace with each other before the bomb explodes.
One of the great attractions of The Big Time is the way it renders history fluid and endlessly mutable; Lily knows of at least two alternate futures for her alone, while Greta has seen empires dissolve in a blink. The reader is told "It's this way: the Big Time is a train, and The Little Time is the countryside and we're on the train, unless we go out a Door."
The Big Time has been enormously influential -- the perceptive viewer can see its influence in TV programmes as diverse as Star Trek: Enterprise and Doctor Who, both of which feature vast time wars, but neither of them has even a fraction of the scope of The Big Time, nor Leiber's astonishing erudition and sheer writing ability. His puns at the beginning of the novel are simply a verbal foreshadowing of the visual sleights-of-hand that are to follow, while the revelation of the true nature of the Change war is nothing short of revelatory.
The Big Time is a novel that gives the reader more to think about with each successive re-reading.
