Hugos Side-Step: Changewar by Fritz Leiber

Collection published: 1983
Contents originally published: 1958-65
Acquired and read: September 2020

Changewar by Fritz Leiber

The Big Time was the only novel in Leiber's "Change War" series, about a vast cosmic time war between implacable enemies, but he published a number of short works in the same milieu, and I liked The Big Time enough to track them down. There's no one collection that reprints all of them, as far as I can tell, so I picked up the most recent collection with most of them... which is from over 35 years ago! (I'm learning that outside of the Lankhmar stories, Leiber isn't kept in print very well.*) Changewar contains seven Change War stories (the space must have been a victim of a timeline revision), some of which revisit characters from The Big Time, but most of which look at different aspects of the conflict.

Of the seven, I would say I liked about half of them. "Try and Change the Past" is a pretty prototypical sf premise at this point: no matter what you do, history will correct itself it. But it's well told and enjoyable, and it introduces the Change War concept pretty well, so it makes for a good opener. I also really liked "The Oldest Soldier," about a guy who really likes soldiers but has never fought himself being inadvertently drawn into the weirdest rear guard action imaginable. "No Great Magic" was neat, too, about an amnesiac in a New York City theatre: only something much more complicated than she can imagine is happening. This is the longest story in the book, but I wanted it to be longer, actually! It ends with her figuring out what is going on, and I would have gladly read about what happened next had Leiber decided to expand it. I think the premise is great, and he doesn't fully exploit its possibilities within this short space.

Others, like a lot of sf, had a good idea not much was done with. "Knight to Move" has some cool concepts in it, and a strong narrative voice, but isn't much of a story; "When the Change-Winds Blow" is evocatively told, but its connections to the actual Change War concept seem pretty scant.

"A Deskful of Girls" was the only one I really didn't like. One of those sf stories where what is going on isn't very clear, but when you can glimpse it, it isn't very interesting either. Like "When the Change-Winds Blow," its connection to the Change War seemed minimal, as well.

As I said in my review of The Big Time, Leiber apparently did not invent the idea of a "time war" but he did popularize it. One might imagine that someone writing forty years before Doctor Who spent decades exploring this concept would read as old hat, but I found that Leiber did a lot of cool, interesting stuff with the concept, and I wish he had done more.

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: Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss

* The two missing stories are "Black Corridor," last reprinted in 1988 (in English, anyway), and "The Haunted Future," last reprinted in 1990.