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arturotuono's review against another edition
4.0
This was an unexpected treasure, a novel that has sadly been forgotten. The science might be a bit wonky, but the ideas are still there (e.g. multiple universes, non-human forces waging war with very human pawns).
Leiber creates a sense of place (or rather a sense of a place that is no place); you learn the cant, the lingo, the jargon.
It feels very stagey in some respects. Aside from a few fantastical moments, all could be adapted for stage (given Leiber's theater background, not a surprise).
This book got me started on my quixotic quest to read all the Hugo Award winning novels.
Leiber creates a sense of place (or rather a sense of a place that is no place); you learn the cant, the lingo, the jargon.
It feels very stagey in some respects. Aside from a few fantastical moments, all could be adapted for stage (given Leiber's theater background, not a surprise).
This book got me started on my quixotic quest to read all the Hugo Award winning novels.
larsdradrach's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting ideas and concepts wrapped loosely in a skeleton story, most of all an anti war story.
But it's a easy read and it holds up well despite it's age.
Recommended for hard core sci-if fans who wants to explore some of the early masters in the genre
But it's a easy read and it holds up well despite it's age.
Recommended for hard core sci-if fans who wants to explore some of the early masters in the genre
wordmaster's review against another edition
3.0
I found this title here on Goodreads and checked it out from my local library. The cover graphic looked hip and the title page said it was published in 2011, but when I started reading I was confused. The writing seemed so... dated. So I backtracked and re-read the description and amazingly found this book was published in 1958! The concept seemed so modern, so cool and contemporary, and yet the chestnut of the idea was from a lifetime ago.
3 stars out of 5. It's a really intriguing concept but the old pulpy sci-fi writing robs it of energy.
3 stars out of 5. It's a really intriguing concept but the old pulpy sci-fi writing robs it of energy.
shookone's review against another edition
2.0
Wow, was this book disappointing. I picked it up on the strength of the incredibly cool concept (soldiers in a time war hanging out in a rest station that’s located outside of time and space) but that concept is really just window dressing for what this book really is, which is a bunch of half formed characters hanging out in a big empty room listening to each other give grandiose speeches. As many others have said, this reads more like a stage play than a novel. Details and descriptions, both of places and people, are sparse and characters don’t talk to each other so much as they monologue at each other. It’s pretty dull.
None of this is helped by the fact that the book is completely lacking in any sense of urgency or stakes. The station is sabotaged, until it isn’t. There’s a ticking time bomb that’s going to go off any second, until there isn’t. There’s a mutiny forming, until everyone decides there’s not. Some soldiers are mad at other soldiers until they’re all fine with each other. Leiber really seems to go out of his way to flatten out every wrinkle the characters in this book have to deal with so that they can feel free to keep on doing what they love most: giving speeches.
In the interest of saying something good about this book, I will point out that the moments when talk of the time war briefly turns in to something a little more weird and paranoid and bigger than these characters are capable of understanding are when The Big Time really shines. “What are we doing here? Why are we fighting this war? Does anyone really know who we’re fighting for or against? Has anyone actually seen the people leading this war? Are we really just fighting the communists here, or is this a war that spans galaxies and billions of years? What does it really mean to live and die when we’re rewriting reality over and over again?” When Leiber plays around in this space I found the book riveting. Unfortunately for this book he just doesn’t do that sort of thing enough here.
None of this is helped by the fact that the book is completely lacking in any sense of urgency or stakes. The station is sabotaged, until it isn’t. There’s a ticking time bomb that’s going to go off any second, until there isn’t. There’s a mutiny forming, until everyone decides there’s not. Some soldiers are mad at other soldiers until they’re all fine with each other. Leiber really seems to go out of his way to flatten out every wrinkle the characters in this book have to deal with so that they can feel free to keep on doing what they love most: giving speeches.
In the interest of saying something good about this book, I will point out that the moments when talk of the time war briefly turns in to something a little more weird and paranoid and bigger than these characters are capable of understanding are when The Big Time really shines. “What are we doing here? Why are we fighting this war? Does anyone really know who we’re fighting for or against? Has anyone actually seen the people leading this war? Are we really just fighting the communists here, or is this a war that spans galaxies and billions of years? What does it really mean to live and die when we’re rewriting reality over and over again?” When Leiber plays around in this space I found the book riveting. Unfortunately for this book he just doesn’t do that sort of thing enough here.
markyon's review against another edition
4.0
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber
Published 1958 in Galaxy Magazine, novel 1961. (Edition Read: Ace Books, (1961), 130 pages)
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958.
Review by Mark Yon
This is one of those reviews I occasionally do about older books, perhaps a little forgotten.
It came about because I was thinking the other day about past Hugo winners, following a discussion over at SFFWorld about the 2013 nominees. That gave way to my remembering that, in my teens, there was a time when I ambitiously tried to read as many Hugo Award winning novels as I could. It was a venture that was rather doomed to failure – they weren’t easily available to a poor lad in a small town in Northern England in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, and so after a lot of the obvious ones (Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land ) I went on to read other things.
But The Big Time was one that I didn’t read beyond the first few pages. I remember looking at my Dune and my Stranger in a Strange Land, both hefty novels, and thinking “How could a book of little more than 100 pages be worthy of a Hugo?” And then I dismissed it, even though I liked a lot of Leiber’s other novels and stories.
Winner of the fourth Hugo Best Novel in 1958, today it is often seen as a bit of a surprise winner.*
In the years since 1958, The Big Time has become one of those books that, alongside Mark Clifton’s winning novel They’d Rather Be Right in 1955, has been questioned as a worthy winner, or at best regarded as ‘just’ a minor winner. Jo Walton at Tor.com has said that other novels that could’ve been worthy of inclusion (and for comparison here) are “Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Jack Vance’s Big Planet, Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets and Eye in the Sky, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, Robert Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer and Citizen of the Galaxy, Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, Van Vogt’s The Empire of the Atom, Philip Jose Farmer’s The Green Odyssey, Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Frederic Brown’s Rogue in Space, and Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp.” Many of these I’ve read, and they remain fond favourites. Is The Big Time really better than those?
Looking around, the opinions about The Big Time seem to polarise. The aforementioned Jo Walton said that she likes The Big Time, but “although it’s in print I don’t hear it talked about much”. Alternatively, Sam Jordison at the Guardian UK newspaper stated when he read it, ‘The best thing that can be said about it is that it's mercifully short.’ However, it was selected for inclusion in the Library of America's two-volume compilation American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and therefore perhaps should be seen as important.
With such differentiated opinions, I felt it was clearly time for a revisit. And I’m pleased I did.
The basic idea of the novel has become a bit of a cliché these days – there is a time war, the Change War, between two alien factions, named ‘The Spiders’ and ‘The Snakes’. Both sides travel across space and time, trying to alter the past and the future to their own needs, and have agents doing their work for them. The story takes place at the Place, a ‘Recuperation Station’, where ‘Entertainer’ Greta Forzane is one of a team who provides rest and relaxation for battle-weary soldiers. Told from Greta’s perspective, the narrative is rather small and focussed, a story of what crime readers would call ‘a locked room mystery’.
When a mission going through the Recuperation Station goes wrong, Greta and her colleagues find themselves with three Hussar soldiers and an atomic bomb, originally on the way to save Rome. Whilst discussing what to do and catching up with the latest events from the War, the whole Place becomes Introverted - isolated from space and time with the loss of its Major Maintainer, the device that keeps the Station working. The group are in what is effectively a locked room, unable to rejoin or communicate with, the Time Streams. The bomb is ticking, with thirty minutes to go, and without the Major Retainer to return them to their usual position there’s seemingly no way that our characters can avoid the Place becoming ‘a sun in a bag’….
I’m really not sure why I dismissed this one before. I just didn’t get it, or was too young to realise. Perhaps it was the cynicism, the dark tone, the sly adultness in a story that initially seems quite simple. Leiber plays with the SF conventions, using ideas that seem simple, yet are quite complex, often in a word or sentence. And it is quite clever, working on more than one level of understanding. For example, instead of ‘Recuperation Station’, read ‘brothel’; for ‘Entertainer’, read ‘prostitute’. Employed by the races at war, but in a way that allows 1950’s publication.
And then there’s the joyous, exuberant use of language:
“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 story-book 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.”
To be honest, there are places where the dialogue is a little clunky. 16th century’s character Sydney Lessingham’s Olde Englyshe is perhaps the most irritating. Generally though, the dialogue’s not as bad as some books I’ve read from the same time. I can see why some might see it as ‘stagey’ – there’s a lot of info-dumping, and dialogue that can stray into monologue at times, although, (again), I’ve read worse from that time. This may be attributable to Leiber’s personal background in the theatre, and probably explains the many references to Shakespeare, Rupert Brooke, Tennyson and the like herein. But if you can cope with the extract above, you shouldn’t find the rest of the book a problem.
Lieber’s known for his unusual characters in his writing, and here’s no exception. It is a small but diverse bunch of characters that are our focus here, to help us make sense of what is going on. We have soldiers from all time periods at the Station, including Mark/Marcus the Roman, Erich the Nazi, Kaby, a female warrior from Crete, Sevensee the satyr from the far future and even an alien furry-octopus from Luna named Ilhilihis/Illy. Of the characters included, Erich is perhaps the most clichéd, although perhaps not too surprising being little more than a decade after World War Two. Nazis were very much the villain of the time – see also Robert Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo (1947).
Our narrator, ballet dancer Greta, is an unusual mix of film star wannabe and psychologist, who has seen too much in her twenty-nine years, and in other ways not enough. Through her narrative we are only seeing one perspective, and it may not be entirely accurate. The Change War clearly affects the combatants, having to deal with the past, present and future simultaneously. Indeed, it is possible that what we are reading here is nothing but an altered memory, ‘a crazy, mixed up dream’. This is an idea that clearly lends itself to the psychedelia of the 1960’s, and also fits entirely with the strangely unreal place between, and beyond, the time streams. Similar things do happen in Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels, too. (It also explains my 1960’s book cover, too, as shown at the top of this review.)
But for me most of all, it is the breath-taking places and events that have changed, often mentioned in one sentence that are memorable. Crete is built up at the expense of Greece, causing the disappearance of Greek culture, Rome collapses a few years after the death of Julius Caesar, the German Nazis occupy Europe after the US and England do not take part in World War Two, “from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!” All mentioned briefly, in little more than a sentence. Despite the focus on the characters being small, the breadth of the impact of the Change War is stunning:
“But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world—one little solar system… and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.”
The Big Time is also a book about war. It is clear that the constant to-ing and fro-ing is affecting our combatants. Their nerves are shot, their behaviour erratic, with paranoia and weariness often exhibited. War is hell, and constant war across time even more so. The people involved are often killed, and their ‘Resurrection’, to play their part in the War again, is both terrifying and humblingly bleak, although, interestingly, Leiber enigmatically points out towards the end that ‘The Change War isn't the blind destruction it seems.’
War-weary cynicism mixed with deadpan humour, cosmic concepts given over in a sentence, and the relative brevity of the book together gives The Big Time’s narrative a hefty punch. Less is definitely more here.
In summary, I’m pleased I went back to this one. It’s not perfect, and definitely not for everyone, but it’s not bad at all. In summary, The Big Time is an underrated attention-grabber of a story, which left me thinking on it long after I’d finished it. And I guess, despite its flaws and despite the strong opposition, that’s why it won a Hugo.
*As indeed was the Award: it was the only year where the now-traditional ‘rocket’ was replaced by a much more boring looking plaque. This was rescinded in 1959.
Published 1958 in Galaxy Magazine, novel 1961. (Edition Read: Ace Books, (1961), 130 pages)
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1958.
Review by Mark Yon
This is one of those reviews I occasionally do about older books, perhaps a little forgotten.
It came about because I was thinking the other day about past Hugo winners, following a discussion over at SFFWorld about the 2013 nominees. That gave way to my remembering that, in my teens, there was a time when I ambitiously tried to read as many Hugo Award winning novels as I could. It was a venture that was rather doomed to failure – they weren’t easily available to a poor lad in a small town in Northern England in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, and so after a lot of the obvious ones (Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land ) I went on to read other things.
But The Big Time was one that I didn’t read beyond the first few pages. I remember looking at my Dune and my Stranger in a Strange Land, both hefty novels, and thinking “How could a book of little more than 100 pages be worthy of a Hugo?” And then I dismissed it, even though I liked a lot of Leiber’s other novels and stories.
Winner of the fourth Hugo Best Novel in 1958, today it is often seen as a bit of a surprise winner.*
In the years since 1958, The Big Time has become one of those books that, alongside Mark Clifton’s winning novel They’d Rather Be Right in 1955, has been questioned as a worthy winner, or at best regarded as ‘just’ a minor winner. Jo Walton at Tor.com has said that other novels that could’ve been worthy of inclusion (and for comparison here) are “Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Jack Vance’s Big Planet, Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets and Eye in the Sky, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range, Robert Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer and Citizen of the Galaxy, Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, Van Vogt’s The Empire of the Atom, Philip Jose Farmer’s The Green Odyssey, Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Frederic Brown’s Rogue in Space, and Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp.” Many of these I’ve read, and they remain fond favourites. Is The Big Time really better than those?
Looking around, the opinions about The Big Time seem to polarise. The aforementioned Jo Walton said that she likes The Big Time, but “although it’s in print I don’t hear it talked about much”. Alternatively, Sam Jordison at the Guardian UK newspaper stated when he read it, ‘The best thing that can be said about it is that it's mercifully short.’ However, it was selected for inclusion in the Library of America's two-volume compilation American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and therefore perhaps should be seen as important.
With such differentiated opinions, I felt it was clearly time for a revisit. And I’m pleased I did.
The basic idea of the novel has become a bit of a cliché these days – there is a time war, the Change War, between two alien factions, named ‘The Spiders’ and ‘The Snakes’. Both sides travel across space and time, trying to alter the past and the future to their own needs, and have agents doing their work for them. The story takes place at the Place, a ‘Recuperation Station’, where ‘Entertainer’ Greta Forzane is one of a team who provides rest and relaxation for battle-weary soldiers. Told from Greta’s perspective, the narrative is rather small and focussed, a story of what crime readers would call ‘a locked room mystery’.
When a mission going through the Recuperation Station goes wrong, Greta and her colleagues find themselves with three Hussar soldiers and an atomic bomb, originally on the way to save Rome. Whilst discussing what to do and catching up with the latest events from the War, the whole Place becomes Introverted - isolated from space and time with the loss of its Major Maintainer, the device that keeps the Station working. The group are in what is effectively a locked room, unable to rejoin or communicate with, the Time Streams. The bomb is ticking, with thirty minutes to go, and without the Major Retainer to return them to their usual position there’s seemingly no way that our characters can avoid the Place becoming ‘a sun in a bag’….
I’m really not sure why I dismissed this one before. I just didn’t get it, or was too young to realise. Perhaps it was the cynicism, the dark tone, the sly adultness in a story that initially seems quite simple. Leiber plays with the SF conventions, using ideas that seem simple, yet are quite complex, often in a word or sentence. And it is quite clever, working on more than one level of understanding. For example, instead of ‘Recuperation Station’, read ‘brothel’; for ‘Entertainer’, read ‘prostitute’. Employed by the races at war, but in a way that allows 1950’s publication.
And then there’s the joyous, exuberant use of language:
“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 story-book 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.”
To be honest, there are places where the dialogue is a little clunky. 16th century’s character Sydney Lessingham’s Olde Englyshe is perhaps the most irritating. Generally though, the dialogue’s not as bad as some books I’ve read from the same time. I can see why some might see it as ‘stagey’ – there’s a lot of info-dumping, and dialogue that can stray into monologue at times, although, (again), I’ve read worse from that time. This may be attributable to Leiber’s personal background in the theatre, and probably explains the many references to Shakespeare, Rupert Brooke, Tennyson and the like herein. But if you can cope with the extract above, you shouldn’t find the rest of the book a problem.
Lieber’s known for his unusual characters in his writing, and here’s no exception. It is a small but diverse bunch of characters that are our focus here, to help us make sense of what is going on. We have soldiers from all time periods at the Station, including Mark/Marcus the Roman, Erich the Nazi, Kaby, a female warrior from Crete, Sevensee the satyr from the far future and even an alien furry-octopus from Luna named Ilhilihis/Illy. Of the characters included, Erich is perhaps the most clichéd, although perhaps not too surprising being little more than a decade after World War Two. Nazis were very much the villain of the time – see also Robert Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo (1947).
Our narrator, ballet dancer Greta, is an unusual mix of film star wannabe and psychologist, who has seen too much in her twenty-nine years, and in other ways not enough. Through her narrative we are only seeing one perspective, and it may not be entirely accurate. The Change War clearly affects the combatants, having to deal with the past, present and future simultaneously. Indeed, it is possible that what we are reading here is nothing but an altered memory, ‘a crazy, mixed up dream’. This is an idea that clearly lends itself to the psychedelia of the 1960’s, and also fits entirely with the strangely unreal place between, and beyond, the time streams. Similar things do happen in Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels, too. (It also explains my 1960’s book cover, too, as shown at the top of this review.)
But for me most of all, it is the breath-taking places and events that have changed, often mentioned in one sentence that are memorable. Crete is built up at the expense of Greece, causing the disappearance of Greek culture, Rome collapses a few years after the death of Julius Caesar, the German Nazis occupy Europe after the US and England do not take part in World War Two, “from the salt mines of Siberia to the plantations of Iowa, from Nizhni Novgorod to Kansas City!” All mentioned briefly, in little more than a sentence. Despite the focus on the characters being small, the breadth of the impact of the Change War is stunning:
“But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world—one little solar system… and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear.”
The Big Time is also a book about war. It is clear that the constant to-ing and fro-ing is affecting our combatants. Their nerves are shot, their behaviour erratic, with paranoia and weariness often exhibited. War is hell, and constant war across time even more so. The people involved are often killed, and their ‘Resurrection’, to play their part in the War again, is both terrifying and humblingly bleak, although, interestingly, Leiber enigmatically points out towards the end that ‘The Change War isn't the blind destruction it seems.’
War-weary cynicism mixed with deadpan humour, cosmic concepts given over in a sentence, and the relative brevity of the book together gives The Big Time’s narrative a hefty punch. Less is definitely more here.
In summary, I’m pleased I went back to this one. It’s not perfect, and definitely not for everyone, but it’s not bad at all. In summary, The Big Time is an underrated attention-grabber of a story, which left me thinking on it long after I’d finished it. And I guess, despite its flaws and despite the strong opposition, that’s why it won a Hugo.
*As indeed was the Award: it was the only year where the now-traditional ‘rocket’ was replaced by a much more boring looking plaque. This was rescinded in 1959.
kepheus's review against another edition
4.0
While definitely anchored in the period it was written, this still managed to entertain and keep me wondering where it was headed.
funkyfreshwizardry's review against another edition
4.0
This was surprisingly good. I enjoyed myself with this book more than I have with any other vintage sci-fi I’ve read thus far. It tells a very human story, couched in an inhuman setting with unique worldbuilding concepts.
The Place is a pocket of reality within the Void, a gray nothingness that comprises the bulk of the Big Time. The Little Time is all our history, our present, our future, the earthly place where all beings are born and live. Some of us can become disconnected from the Little Time and thus enter the Big Time, which is outside of all that. You can enter the Big Time to time-travel around the Little Time, but you can’t time-travel through the Big Time. Make sense? Oh, and of course, two competing factions are using this ability to fight against one-another, constantly screwing up our Little Time in pursuit of war.
We hear about all this, but the story takes place in…well, the Place. This is a pocket of rest, recuperation, and entertainment within the Big Time, where Soldiers are sent to recover so they don’t crack, literally or figuratively. Our narrator is a woman named Greta, an Entertainer responsible for fixing up, wining, and dining visitors to this Place. We get to know her and the other employees as the story unfolds. What happens within the Place forces each of the characters to face their part in this weird world head-on. Because this story is not about an ordinary day in the Place - this is about the day when some visiting Soldiers cause a whole lot of drama.
I found the characters to be distinct and easy to keep straight, despite their number. And I enjoyed how they don’t all fit into tropey boxes. Despite some of the overdramatic and quirky dialogue choices, they still feel like plausibly real people. Their choices don’t always make sense, but somehow it makes sense that they don’t make sense? They’re all from different cultures and time periods, and some are even aliens. I found their occasional incomprehensibility additive rather than confusing.
This book holds up really well for its age and still feels fresh. It lacks most of the overt “women issues” that plague sci-fi (though it does have one or two misogyny snags, inevitably). The worldbuilding mostly makes sense, and interacts with character development in clever ways. And the narrative asks some interesting, big questions about time, our place in it, and what happens if a person goes outside of it. I was hooked even though it’s a short book.
I dock one star only for some dialogue sequences being too long (I suspect some of the people who did not enjoy this book got left behind in these parts), and our POV character is noticeably bland. These shortcomings did not diminish my enjoyment much. This is the first vintage sci-fi or fantasy I’ve read that I would wholeheartedly recommend to a modern reader.
The Place is a pocket of reality within the Void, a gray nothingness that comprises the bulk of the Big Time. The Little Time is all our history, our present, our future, the earthly place where all beings are born and live. Some of us can become disconnected from the Little Time and thus enter the Big Time, which is outside of all that. You can enter the Big Time to time-travel around the Little Time, but you can’t time-travel through the Big Time. Make sense? Oh, and of course, two competing factions are using this ability to fight against one-another, constantly screwing up our Little Time in pursuit of war.
We hear about all this, but the story takes place in…well, the Place. This is a pocket of rest, recuperation, and entertainment within the Big Time, where Soldiers are sent to recover so they don’t crack, literally or figuratively. Our narrator is a woman named Greta, an Entertainer responsible for fixing up, wining, and dining visitors to this Place. We get to know her and the other employees as the story unfolds. What happens within the Place forces each of the characters to face their part in this weird world head-on. Because this story is not about an ordinary day in the Place - this is about the day when some visiting Soldiers cause a whole lot of drama.
I found the characters to be distinct and easy to keep straight, despite their number. And I enjoyed how they don’t all fit into tropey boxes. Despite some of the overdramatic and quirky dialogue choices, they still feel like plausibly real people. Their choices don’t always make sense, but somehow it makes sense that they don’t make sense? They’re all from different cultures and time periods, and some are even aliens. I found their occasional incomprehensibility additive rather than confusing.
This book holds up really well for its age and still feels fresh. It lacks most of the overt “women issues” that plague sci-fi (though it does have one or two misogyny snags, inevitably). The worldbuilding mostly makes sense, and interacts with character development in clever ways. And the narrative asks some interesting, big questions about time, our place in it, and what happens if a person goes outside of it. I was hooked even though it’s a short book.
I dock one star only for some dialogue sequences being too long (I suspect some of the people who did not enjoy this book got left behind in these parts), and our POV character is noticeably bland. These shortcomings did not diminish my enjoyment much. This is the first vintage sci-fi or fantasy I’ve read that I would wholeheartedly recommend to a modern reader.
garygach's review against another edition
5.0
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]
tsavatar's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting characters, interesting world, kind of flat prose. The characters, as colorful as they are are just not really as interesting as many of Leiber's others. I do like the idea of an extratemporal R&R station and of mis-matched soldiers looking for a weary rest. Not bad overall, but it drags on, even as a short book.