Hugos 1958: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

Originally published: 1958
Acquired: July 2020
Read: August 2020

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

The Big Time won the 1958 Hugo Award for Best Novel or Novelette.* Like a lot of Leiber's work, it's long out of print, though I was able to get a nice-looking 2000 Tor hardcover for cheap. The Big Time was one of the first of Leiber's "Change War" stories, about a time war being raged between factions across human history; the SF Encyclopedia doesn't credit Leiber with inventing this now-familiar sf idea, but does indicate he popularized it. It's an odd book, though. Instead of confronting the idea head on (as, say, this year's Hugo winner This Is How You Lose the Time War did), The Big Time takes place entirely in the Place, a recreation and recuperation area for Change War soldiers positioned outside of time and space; we never see the Change War even close to directly.

Instead, we see a set of Change War soldiers from different eras and ideologies, all now serving a common cause, as well as recreation staff; the first-person narrator is a woman entertainer in the Place. Two different groups of soldiers arrive in the Place at once, and things go a little haywire, mostly centering around one who was a Rupert Brooke-esque World War I poet cut down in his prime, and then recruited. There are some neat concepts here, and I liked the voice of Greta, the narrator, and I appreciate that Leiber didn't come at his Change War head on... but I'm not convinced this was the best possible story to tell about this idea, and even though it's quite short (just 128 pages in my edition), it still felt a bit too long. But there is really neat stuff here, some of it quite disturbing, and I zipped right through it, and enjoyed almost all of it. A good book, good enough that I'm going to read a collection of Leiber's Change War short fiction.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: Changewar by Fritz Leiber

* This is the only year there was a combined award for novel and novelette. A lot about the awards fluctuated early on. If you've been following my posts about old Hugo winners, you'll note I skipped 1957, because that year the only awards were for Best American Professional Magazine, Best British Professional Magazine, and Best Fanzine. No awards for individual works at all!