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.