The Nominees
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber.
The Actual Results
- The Big Time by Fritz Leiber.
How I Would Have Voted
- (Abstain)
Explanation
The Big Time has a lot of things in it that I normally would like. It’s a time travel story that bucks the popular convention of the butterfly effect—the idea that small changes in the past lead to big changes in the future. Instead, Leiber’s view of time travel is much closer to Connie Willis’s, in that the continuum itself tends to seek a stable equilibrium, negating the effect of small changes. But unlike Willis’s books, the time travelers aren’t just a bunch of cloistered academics looking to be passive observers of history. Instead, there’s a full-on time war between two monolithic factions, each of which has screwed so much with the timeline that they hardly know who they are anymore.
So what’s so bad about it that I feel it didn’t earn my vote? I’ve tried twice to read this book, and I’ve DNFed it both times because I just can’t get over the fact that it’s about a bunch of comfort women—with everything that term implies—servicing the time warriors of their particular faction. In WWII, “comfort women” was a euphemistic term for civilian sex slaves taken captive by the Japanese Imperial Army. That’s basically what’s happening here, except it’s played straight, with no ick factor, or even really an acknowledgment that an ick factor might exist. And that’s what turns me off—not just the ick factor itself, but the way that the author treats it as something normal and blase—progressive, even. After all, every good time soldier needs a “sex therapist.” </sarc>
Usually when older science fiction turns me off, it has something to do with the sexual content. So many scifi writers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s had these almost utopian visions of a free love future, or at least a very optimistic view of the sexual revolution. They never imagined that we might become even more prudish than the Victorians, or that incels would be a thing, or that we’d be facing a loneliness epidemic, a population collapse, and both a war on men and a war on women because, in large part, of how the Boomers tore down all the boundaries around sex and sexuality—which is to say nothing of how so many people can’t even define what a woman is these days.
These scifi writers were supposed to be our visionaries, but they were so totally blinded by their own carnal lusts that they failed to predict the second- and third-order effects of the kind of free love future they were writing about. That’s not exactly the case with The Big Time, but it falls into that same trap, along with most of Fritz Leiber’s work that I’ve read. However, it wasn’t so bad that I’d vote No Award over this book. Rather, it was more of a background element that rubbed me the wrong way, to the point where I just couldn’t finish the book.