This will be relatively short.
The book should have been titled “The Big Suck”…cause boy does it disappoint.
Leiber is one of the biggies of mid to late 20th century Sci-Fi along with contemporaries of Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Hubbard, Clarke, Poul Anderson and others. I knew of him some near 40 years ago from my early D&D days with the connections there to the Fafrd and the Grey Mouser line of stories (though never read them), and I may go back and read some of his fantasy work given its supposed similarity to Lovecraft and Howard that I enjoy.
This however? Despite its having been awarded the Hugo Award 1958 it never should have even been published in book form. Starting as a serial tales in Analog magazine, it really should have been boiled down to a very short story and might have been better of.
Essentially a “closed room” or “lifeboat” story, it revolves around a handful of individuals who have been placed in a “R&R House” that is separated from ongoing space-time by a macguffin like device to allow individuals fighting in an ongoing war between unknown groups, to recover their mental and physical wounds. I guess the fact that some of these individuals are “aliens” is supposed to interest us. It doesn’t. beyond hearing that one has tentacles and another is centaur-like…we don’t really know or care anything about them. Nor do we learn to care about the German soldier from WWII or the English poet-soldier from WWI or the women/doctors/bartender who inhabit this R&R space.
Told from a first person perspective of one of the female “entertainers” the story jumps around and results in finding an atomic bomb being placed in this “room” and threatens everyone’s existence because for a period of time the “room” is cut off from other space-time access in a “bubble” that can’t be escaped. Within this trapped bubble the characters attempt to find out who cut them all off and put them at risk…within this various characters try to work out their issues with popping in and out of history to fight a war they don’t understand why they are fighting…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
None of it is very enthralling, the characters don’t carry any weight, and there isn’t much development over the length of the work. The story doesn’t go anywhere literally or figuratively. No real lessons are learned by either the reader or the characters. It should have remained a brief snippet of a magazine rather than being dragged out for near 200 painful pages. Blech.