The Big Time

Spiders and Snakes and A-Bombs to bake! Fritz once again proves that he could handle almost any medium, any subject with this wild tale of a time war between these two S & S organizations (and the SS is deliberate). A war that stretches from 100 million years in our past to at least as far in the future - but all the action of this tale takes place in a very confined space known simply as The Place, isolated from the Change... Read Full Review

A book that deals with time travel in a way beyond anything I've seen before or since. Leiber sees time travel ability as a step in the development of the species, and puts that little philosophical gem into this tight little piece. Not quite a novel (it really does read like a stage play) this actually ends up as a bit of a whodunnit.Characters put the next stage of human development in the context of ordinary human... Read Full Review

It looks like every respectful science fiction writer at one point or another wrote a book on time travel. This one is by far the most original one I have read. The novel is short(about 135 pages) and it is written like a play. There is a war going on between the Spiders and Snakes and they use humans to fight it. So they take all these dead people from different time periods, ressurrect them and send them to war. Why... Read Full Review

This book took me completely by surprise. Fritz Leiber kept me consumed in this book by writing some very original dialogue for his characters. For example, Greta Forzane, the lead character and narrator of the story, has such a delightful way of speaking that she kept me riveted throughout the entire book. It is also one of those novels that leads the reader to the most logical conclusion; then gives an even better... Read Full Review

I first came across The Big Time as an inclusion in the compilation book Ship Of Shadows, a hard to get library copy. That was in early 1998, and I was delighted to be able to purchase the recently republished story by itself.Like all of Fritz Leiber's work the writing is supremely articulate and the story telling carefully, and craftily constructed, holding the reader from start to finish.The main character twenty-nine... Read Full Review