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    The Big Time
    The Big Time
    The Big Time
    Ebook162 pages2 hours

    The Big Time

    By Fritz Leiber

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    About this ebook

    Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to recall exactly the same past from one day to the next? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, then you've had hints of the Change War.

    It's been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides--"Spiders" and "Snakes"--battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2011
    ISBN9780312877125
    Author

    Fritz Leiber

    Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was the highly acclaimed author of numerous science fiction stories and novels, many of which were made into films. He is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won many awards, including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

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    Reviews for The Big Time

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    • 5/5
      i was secretary to this brilliant human being, and this is my personal favorite book of all of his remarkable titles. [the 'change wars' cycle has other goodies too]

    • 5/5
      I can't think of a better way to start off the Hugo's than this story. Set in The Piano Bar at the End of the Universe, this is a simple, short book that left me feeling completely decompressed from some of the extremely dense books I've been reading lately while still being excited for science fiction. The incorporation of strange technologies and aliens reminded me of the feeling I get when I'm watching a good Star Trek episode, one where they aren't trying to technobabble a science-y explanation, but are simply using technology as a rhetorical tool to bring together elements that could not otherwise exist in the same place. There is no need to explain exactly what "Inversion" does in The Big Time, it is being completely shut away from the cosmos and that is all we need to know.
    • 5/5
      Say you're about to die in a few minutes, maybe, like our narrator Greta Forzane, after ten minutes of being raped to death by soldiers of a Third Reich that goes from the salt mines of Siberia to the cornfields of Iowa. And then you are offered an opportunity to escape your fate - an opportunity no one ever refuses. Of course, you have to enroll with the Spiders or the Snakes, become a Demon in their eternal Change War, a vast cosmic struggle across millions of years to change history to ... well, no one is really sure what the war's point is. You just serve your side as a Soldier or an Entertainer.Greta's an Entertainer, one of the staff in the Place, a zone outside of regular time and space, an R&R stop for the Soldiers back from missions to terminate the Roman Empire early, nuke Ancient Crete, or kidnap a baby Einstein. History is a stubborn, hard thing to change. And, if you succeed, there's always the blowback of the Change Winds which may you take you into nonexistence.Part party girl, part song and dance trouper, part sex therapist and comfort woman, she has a thing for Sid, former contemporary of Shakespeare - when duty doesn't have her attending to Nazi soldier boyfriend Erich. Her co-workers are Beau, formerly of a Great South that never knew Grant's gunboats on the Mississippi, and Doc, a drunken, derelict medical officer, formerly of a Nazi occupied Czarist Russia. And then there's Maud from the 23rd Century and New Girl who seems destined to off herself in many versions of the early 20th century - until recruited.Enter three soldiers - a Nazi, a Roman, and a casualty of Passchendaele - back from a botched mission. New Girl falls for the latter, a poet who starts suggesting something suspiciously like rebellion against their Spider masters. And then a distress call, a rescue mission for three other Soldiers - two of them aliens.In 160 pages of story, Leiber creates and explains a world of Demons, Ghostgirls, Doublegangers, and Zombies, throws out a bunch of alternate histories, convincingly shows the psychology of those who are comfortable with the chaos of the Change War, and, ripped from normal lives, what they most miss.Leiber puts his theatrical experience to good use. With only nine characters, one setting, and offstage action related in convincing, if sometimes poetic, dialogue, this is one classic that lives up to its billing. In fact, it's one of those rare science fiction classics that history and technological progress have not dated, not even a bit.The book comes with an informative introduction by Leiber about the creation of the novel and the Change War series - though this story stands entirely on its own and an afterword by Robert Thurston on the theatrical elements of the novel.
    • 3/5
      Part of my plan this year (my 49th on this earth) is to read books that I started but never finished. I took this book on a family vacation when I was 16 and got stuck somewhere in the first five pages. Reading it this time, I could see why...it took me probably 20 pages (in a very short novel) to get the characters and setting straight in my head. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed it by the end. It made me yearn for some more science fiction of that vintage. (This was a 1958 Hugo Award Winner.)
    • 2/5
      A story which looks at time travel from outside time, and the possible consequences of deliberate interference with event with the intent of manipulating the future. The protagonists are all actors in a war being waged across time, by two ill-defined groups known as the spiders and snakes.The war setting is typical of 1960s SF, where the cold war and its various hot proxies in Vietnam and elsewhere were inescapable realities which affected much fiction. To me, this was very much a book of its time. I found the prose a bit laboured, and the story ultimately unengaging. I've greatly enjoyed some of Fritz Leiber's short stories, most memorably "Gonna Roll the Bones", but this book didn't provide anything like the same sort of enjoyment. It won a Hugo, and maybe that means it was more striking at the time it was written than now, some 40 years later. Certainly there are many ideas and devices that set it apart from the fiction of the time - a female narrator, aliens from the past as well as the future - but they aren't enough to rescue it now for me.
    • 4/5
      I liked the first two thirds of this short cold war novel quite a bit, but felt a bit let down by the ending. It certainly has a very different feel from your normal scifi yarn, telling the tale of what happens to a limited cast of characters trapped in a single room (outside of time and space) over the course of a few hours. Indeed, it has the feeling a an ensemble play (which might have worked even better with a bit smaller cast of better defined characters)..
    • 3/5
      Just barely makes it into the "worth reading" pile ... but you have to get beyond the dated writing style and casual misogyny ... and it's really more of a novella based on its length.

    Book preview

    The Big Time - Fritz Leiber

    INTRODUCTION

    by Fritz Leiber

    The remaining interior wall of the demolished building had on it the pattern of what had been destroyed: three floors and a stairway; grimy but with lighter rectangles where pictures had been hung on it or furniture set against it; a commanding and haunted flat expanse.

    My friend Art Kuhl, author of Royal Road and the still more impressive novel Obit. (as far as I know never published) said, What a challenge to Gully Jimson! He was surprised to find I’d never read Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth and so knew nothing of the rapscallion old painter who could never see a big empty wall without feeling the irresistible urge to paint a mural on it, whether it was coming down tomorrow or not:

    I respected Art. I read the book at once and also the two other novels in the trilogy, Herself Surprised and To Be A Pilgrim, which cover the same events from three different viewpoints, and was struck by their style of what can be called intensified and embellished first person: not only is each story told by one person, but he or she has a unique and highly colorful way of speaking, with all sorts of vivid little eccentricities of language—they even think to themselves differently.

    So (although I didn’t know it at once) Greta Forzane was born, with her punning religious ejaculations and her frank, cool, deliberately cute way of speaking—always the little girl putting on an ingratiating comedy act.

    I hadn’t written anything for four years, my longest dry spell. I knew from experience that at such times a first-person story is the easiest way to break silence—it solves the problem of what you can tell and what you can’t, whereas in a third-person story you can bring in anything, an embarrassment of riches, and I determined that my next story would be in the intensified first person of Joyce Cary.

    I’ve always been fascinated by time-travel tales in which soldiers are recruited from different ages to serve side by side in one war—there’s something irresistible about putting a Doughboy, a Hussar, a Landsknecht and a Roman Legionary in one tent—and it’s also exciting to think of a war fought in and across time, where battles can actually change the past (one of the truly impossibles, but who knows? Olaf Stapledon wrote about swinging it)—it’s an old minor theme in science fiction; I remember stories by Ed Hamilton and, I think, Jack Williamson. I determined to write such a story and to put the emphasis on the soldiers rather than on the two (or More?) warring powers. Those would be big and shadowy, so you couldn’t be altogether sure which side you were fighting on and at the very best you’d have only the feeling that you were defending something bad against something worse—the familiar predicament of man.

    To keep the focus on a few individuals, I put the story in one setting, a small rest and recreation center staffed by entertainers who were also therapists—some of them sex therapists, a concept that had rather more novelty back in 1956 and early 1957, which was when I wrote this rather short novel (in exactly a hundred days from first note to final typing finished, it counted out). The words got to flowing rather fast and fluently for me—when I start to type phonetically (I for eye, to and too and two interchangeable) I know I’m hot—though I rarely did more than a thousand a day. I tried the experiment of playing music to start myself off each day and this time it worked. The pieces were Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Pathetique piano sonata and the Schubert Unfinished. The book is also keyed to the two songs Gentlemen Rankers and Lili Marlene and I sometimes played those two. (The only quotation haunting me that didn’t get into the book was from a Noel Coward song, We’re all of us just rotten to the core, Maud.)

    My plot was ready made. My disillusioned soldiers would try to resign from the war and set up a little utopia, like Spartacus and his gladiators, and then find out they couldn’t, for there’s no discharge from the war—another familiar human predicament.

    To dramatize the effects of time travel, science fiction usually assumes that if you could go back and change one crucial event, the entire future would be drastically altered—as in Ward Moore’s great novel Bring the Jubilee where the Southrons seize the Round Tops at the start and win the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War (and then lose it again, heartbreakingly, when the hero goes back and unintentionally changes that same circumstance). But that wouldn’t have suited my purposes, so I assumed a Law of the Conservation of Reality, meaning that the past would resist change (temporal reluctance) and tend to work back quickly into its old course, and you’d have to go back and make many little changes, sometimes over and over again, before you could get a really big change going—perhaps the equivalent of an atomic chain reaction. It still seems to me a plausible assumption, reflecting the tenacity of events and the difficulty of achieving anything of real significance in this cosmos—a measure of the strength of the powers that be.

    The energy I generated writing this novel of the Change War of the Spiders and Snakes (as I called the two sides, to keep them mysterious and unpleasant, as major powers always are, inscrutable and nasty) overflowed at once into two related short stories, Try and Change the Past and Damnation Morning, and later into two others, The Oldest Soldier and Knight to Move, but it wasn’t until 1963 that I did a short novelette with most of the same characters, No Great Magic, where my entertainers have become a travelling theatrical repertory company putting on performances, mostly one-night-stands, across space and time, and under that cover working their little changes in the fabric of history, nibbling like mice at the foundations of the universe—now they were becoming soldiers themselves as well as entertainers. An anachronistic performance of Macbeth for Elizabeth the First and for Shakespeare himself tied the story together and gave it dramatic unity, while I had to give Greta Forzane amnesia, so she could learn about the Change War all over again.

    This story allowed me to draw on my own Shakespearean experiences and (once planned—it began as a modern tale of an agoraphobic young woman who literally lived in a dressing room, no Change War or science fantasy at all as first conceived) was remarkably quick in being written—ten days as I recall.

    I’m still trying to write the sequel to that one—and still hope to do so one day; at least it’s one of my penultimate projects.

    —Fritz Leiber

    San Francisco

    1

    When shall we three meet again

    In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

    When the hurlyburly’s done.

    When the battle’s lost and won.

    —Macbeth

    ENTER THREE HUSSARS

    MY NAME is Greta Forzane. Twenty-nine and a party girl would describe me. I was born in Chicago, of Scandinavian parents, but now I operate chiefly outside space and time—not in Heaven or Hell, if there are such places, but not in the cosmos or universe you know, either.

    I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star who also bears my first name, but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own. I need it, for my job is to nurse back to health and kid back to sanity Soldiers badly roughed up in the biggest war going. This war is the Change War, a war of time travelers—in fact, our private name for being in this war is being on the Big Time. Our Soldiers fight by going back to change the past, or even ahead to change the future, in ways to help our side win the final victory a billion or more years from now. A long killing business, believe me.

    You don’t know about the Change War, but it’s influencing your lives all the time and maybe you’ve had hints of it without realizing.

    Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn’t seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the storybook kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it’s hard to believe they’ll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you’ve had hints of the Change War.

    How I got recruited into the Change War, how it’s conducted, what the two sides are, why you don’t consciously know about it, what I really think about it—you’ll learn in due course.

    The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my normal title is Entertainer and I’ve got my silly side, as you’ll find out.

    My pals are two other gals and three guys from quite an assortment of times and places. We’re a pretty good team, and with Sid bossing, we run a pretty good Recuperation Station, though we have our family troubles. But most of our troubles come slamming into the Place with the beat-up Soldiers, who’ve generally just been going through hell and want to raise some of their own. As a matter of fact, it was three newly arrived Soldiers who started this thing I’m going to tell you about, this thing that showed me so much about myself and everything.

    When it started, I had been on the Big Time for a thousand sleeps and two thousand nightmares, and working in the Place for five hundred-one thousand. This two-nightmares routine every time you lay down your dizzy little head is rough, but you pretend to get used to it because being on the Big Time is supposed to be worth it.

    The Place is midway in size and atmosphere between a large nightclub where the Entertainers sleep in and a small Zeppelin hangar decorated for a party, though a Zeppelin is one thing we haven’t had yet. You go out of the Place, but not often if you have any sense and if you are an Entertainer like me, into the cold light of a morning filled with anything from the earlier dinosaurs to the later spacemen, who look strangely similar except for

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