The Big Time
by Fritz Leiber
Summary
Two factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, are fighting a war up and down the whole of history, each changing the past to weaken the other, so that events, nations and entire species blink in and out of having existed. Soldiers are recruited by being plucked out of the moment of their deaths, which means an army can contain a Roman legionary, a Nazi officer, a Venusian and a woman from a future that may no longer happen.
The whole novel takes place in one room. The Place is a recreation station outside spacetime where wounded Spiders come to rest, staffed by a small crew of entertainers, and it is narrated by Greta Forzane, an entertainer from 1930s Chicago, in a fast, wisecracking, defensive voice.
A raiding party arrives with casualties and an atomic bomb. Then the door to the outside stops working, the Place is cut adrift, and one of them has hidden the machine that anchors the Place outside spacetime. What follows is a locked room mystery among people from six centuries, conducted while the universe outside may or may not still exist.
At about one hundred and thirty pages it is barely a novel, and it was written to be staged: unity of time, place and action, a cast that enters and exits, and dialogue doing all the work.
Greta's voice carries it. She is funny, frightened and evasive, she keeps telling you she is only an entertainer and not important, and the reason she says so turns out to matter.
Best for readers who want something formally odd and very short, and a demonstration that a war across all of history can be told entirely in one room, without a single battle on the page.
Historical Context & Significance
The Big Time won the 1958 Hugo Award for Best Novel, in a year when the category was defined as novel or novelette, which is how a work this short took it.
Fritz Leiber was the son of a Shakespearean actor and had worked as an actor himself, and the play like construction is deliberate rather than a limitation of length.
It belongs to his Change War sequence of stories, which he continued in short fiction for years afterwards, and it is one of the earliest treatments of a war fought by altering the timeline, a premise later fiction has used constantly.
Leiber won the Hugo again in 1965 for The Wanderer, took six Hugos and three Nebulas across a career spanning five decades, and was named a Grand Master in 1981. He also coined the term sword and sorcery.