The Big Time

The Big Time is a short science fiction novel by the American writer Fritz Leiber, published in two parts in Galaxy Magazine in 1958 and reprinted in book form several times afterwards. It received the Hugo Award for Best Novel or Novelette that year.

The war in the book is fought between two factions able to travel through time, known as the Spiders and the Snakes. Neither side's identity, origin or reason for the nicknames is explained. Each recruits from every period it can reach, so the personnel of the Change War include Cretan Amazons, Roman legionaries, Hussars, Wehrmacht soldiers, American infantry, Space Commandos and non-human recruits drawn from billions of years in the past and the future.

The action stays inside one enclosed rest station where casualties are brought and entertainers and medical staff work, and it covers the length of a single crisis there, with the whole of history as the background. Because the point of the war is to alter what has already happened, none of the people in the room can be sure of the version of events they remember.