The Big Time
1958 • 86 pages

Ratings13

Average rating2.4

15

Ugh. Insipid. Read this in one sitting. Could have spent that time doing something else. Like staring into space, mentally organizing my taxes, maybe just counting numbers to see how high I could go.

Basic premise: Undead, semi-dead, alternatively-alive protagonists live in The Place, where they are Entertainers to Soldiers fighting in the great Change War. The Change War is a big cosmic time-space war, where the “Spiders” (good?) fight the “Snakes” (bad?) by constantly altering timelines. Dead people are recruited, upon death, into this fight.

All of this is very fuzzily explained, but it's basically about wibbly wobbly timey wimey... hand wavery.

It's also a bottle episode, as we never leave The Place, which is a brothel/bar. Also, let me be clear: not much happens. Well, except for long pontifications, some homophobia/sexism, flat caricatures and uninteresting characters, and our friendly, can't-have-sci-fi-without-it Good Ol' Boy life philosophizing.

Pass.

December 19, 2014