David Ghiurco Team 4B The Big Time Fritz Leiber 1958 A) Author Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr was born on December 24, 1910 in Chicago, Illinois to Fritz Leiber, Sr and Virginia Bronson Leiber. His parents were playwrights and passionate actors. Leiber studied philosophy at the University of Chicago (1928-32) and finished at the top of his class, graduating with honors. He married Jonquil Stephens on January 16, 1936 and had a son, Justin Leiber, in 1938. Justin later died in 1969. Fritz Leiber became a full-time writer after working on the staff of Science Digest for 11 years. In 1992, the last year of his life, Leiber married his second wife, Margo Skinner, a long-time friend. He died on September 5, 1992. His autobiography can be found in his book The Ghost Light (1984). He is well known as an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Other than The Big Time, some of his other well-known works include Our Lady of Darkness (1977), whose characters and events very closely resemble the author’s circumstances in real life, and A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969), which won 5 Hugo awards, a dystopian, science fiction novel that explores a different historic timeline of the United States in which Texas conquers the entire North American continent. B) Summary The novel is a science fiction story which takes place during the “Change War,” a timeline warfare between 2 factions: Snakes and Spiders. Both factions consist of humans, humanoid- like creatures, and extra-terrestrial creatures. The troops of the factions are recruited not only from all the extent of the Universe, but also from all the extent of time: soldiers from the armies of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Stalin, Julius Ceasar, as well as tribal warriors of the Amazon and other native ethnicities, in addition to Venusian satyrs (recruited from Venus a billion years into the future), Lunans (recruited from a billion-year old civilization that used to exist on Earth’s Moon) and many others. In the context of the novel, each faction is involved in a self-propagating and long-drawn-out conflict to change the past and erase the opposing faction out of existence. The Spiders are on the side of the “West” and the Snakes fight to advance the interests of the “East.” Although the novel is about time travel, the story itself does not involve and temporal dislocation, and the events of the novel actually transpire over the course of a few hours. The setting of the story is The Place, an artificially-created bubble of space-time that lies outside the Universe and its timeline. The Place is a Recuperation Station where soldiers recover from the eternal battle raging on in the timeline. The narrator of the novel is Greta, a human female who is employed at the Recuperation Station to entertain and take care of soldiers. According to the story, the known Universe runs on “Little Time.” The Change War soldiers and their facilities / headquarters (Recuperation Stations, Entertainment Pit Stops, Field Hospitals, etc) and all other facilities which are located within artificially-created bubbles of space-time outside of the Universe, follow “Big Time.” Leiber’s themes in the novel draw upon writings of Hegel, Darwin, Newton, and even Sartre to create a self-contained philosophy of time. Passages that describe this philosophy are often quite confusing or even mind-boggling to follow. For example, Leiber describes his “Law of the Conservation of Reality” postulate which says, among other things: “Time has its own inertia. It wants to stay constant. Time travel with the intent to change history will encounter huge resistance, and thus transforming history meaningfully will need countless little changes instead of a big change at one particular place in space-time.” Leiber also indicates “It is impossible to time travel through the time you time travel in when you time travel.” The crux of the novel captures the heated discussions between individuals as well as collective groups over the subject of the Change War. In the story continuum, the individuals currently residing at the Recuperation Station are split along many ideological lines regarding the past, present, future, fate of the Change War, and post-war resolutions. Some take on existentialist views and do not want the war to end because there is nothing for them after the war, while others desire to live a peaceful private life if the eternal time conflict would ever cease. The debates and discussions carry on for a significant part of the book, but the story conflict-climax journey begins when someone finds a “Time-Atomic Bomb” hidden on the station set on a 30-minute countdown. If and when the bomb detonates, those capture by its radius will be plummeted into a primordial past with no access to any technology and no hope of ever returning to what each individual may know as “civilization.” Through this complex intertwining of philosophy and technological concepts, Leiber cleverly and stylistically explores themes of pseudo-immortality, existentialism, purpose of life, religion (after all, the two sides in the Change war are so close to being godlike that the individuals who serve them do not have any idea what the purpose of the war actually is and what progress is actually being made. This is a veiled stab at blind faith/religion) and most importantly, irony. After all, the residents of The Place have been cut out of their lifeline and timeline so that they can be practically immortal soldiers in the Change War. They have escaped death by going to a pocket universe which does not follow the normal time flow of those in the known Universe. And yet, they find themselves in a deadly situation: less than an hour to resolve the atomic-time bomb issue before everyone in the Place is annihilated. C) Technology’s effect on fictional society Life at the Place is thoroughly transformed by advancements in science and technology. Not only is extra-terrestrial travel a real possibility, but extra-temporal travel is a real possibility. This has many unique implications on many historical societies in the book. People who lived in ancient times are now exposed to post-apocalyptic conflict and are granted pseudo- immortality through the life provided by the Place. Individuals who lived in 1,000 B.C. (and who, logically, had not the slightest idea about anything technological, electronic, etc.) now time travel thousands of years into the future into a dystopian time-era which is unpredictable and which poses a whole different set of questions about existence and understanding. Technology is usually intended to make people’s lives easier (net easier anyway, there are always disadvantages/drawbacks). The impact of technology on this dystopian society dramatizes this double-edged sword of societal improvement to a whole new level. The people of The Big Time have figured out how to manipulate the space-time fabric and make whatever they want out of it. This causes an eternal time-war in which people can continuously double-down on their decisions and go back to the past and change them, propagating a vicious cycle. The most obvious message about technological impacts on society is that sometimes… very advanced technology serves no real purpose than to advance conflicts of interest. D) Technology’s effect on real society Thankfully, no one has yet discovered how to manipulate the space-time fabric in the real world (although the internet is abuzz with the recent discovery/confirmation of gravitational waves which confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity). However, a temporal war is by necessity also a technological war. The Big Time effectively displays the results of a second Cold War, one which failed to de-escalate. And one which is infinitely more catastrophic than the first. For the past few decades and up to the present day, a large part of the scientific community is trying to expand its horizons beyond Earth. Mars colonization has a lot of attention and space travel may actually soon be possible without gravitational acceleration. This will be the first step in propelling our society into a new era, one which will be prone to many conflicts of interest. Eventually, these conflicts will beg the question: Was it really worth it to push the limits of technological innovation to this point, only to end up in technological warfare? .