Book Review: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

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.

Three Sci-Fi Novels...Two Good...One, Not So Much...

Maybe I’m just a classic Sci-Fi fan and am officially an “old”….

But then again…I’ll take the fact that I greatly enjoyed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and could not stand Consider Phelbas as a sign that I’m not quite ready for “retirement” yet.

Philip K. Dick’s seminal “DADOES” is of course the basis for the movie Bladerunner and one of if not the most well known of his works. Having read other novels by Dick I was not prepared for such a straightforward read. Less psychedelic than something such as Lies, Inc. or retro as The Man in the High Castle DADOES is more of a futuristic Raymond Chandler work than anything else with the beaten down gumshoe, perpetrators in hiding and femme fatale all included. Its a bit hard to read without picturing Harrison Ford as the protagonist and Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty given how closely the movie hewed to the book but seeing the film first and then reading the novel does not ruin the experience and each stands on its own as a masterpiece of its format. Ridley Scott’s film ends up being far more cyberpunk in nature and while still a core of any sci-fi curriculum, DADOES resembles The Man in the High Castle than it does something like Neuromancer or Snow Crash. Regardless, you will still be stunned by how prescient it is and how many underlying themes of AI, the nature of consciousness, role of media, etc. that are present here look out from their post some 50 years ago at today’s world. Putting this up there with 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 is completely appropriate.

Consider Phelbas on the other hand is an overly long, meandering, mess of a “space opera”. I began reading it as, well, Elon Musk kept naming his drone ships used to recover SpaceX rockets out in the ocean after ships present in these novels and I kept hearing about how these series of books by Iain Banks were so great and such a wonderful representation of AI, that I had to read them. I could not have been more disappointed. Outrageously long (seriously, do some authors get paid by the word?), silly in its action, disjointed, muddled, without purpose and seemingly just a series of ridiculous mishaps befalling the main character over and over. Throw in moronic depictions of “aliens” all over the place and you have a cajun soup of spacefaring tropes….I’ll pass regardless of who may think the book is worth it. Musk likely enjoyed it during an acid trip or two where everything seems “cool” without real analysis…

Lastly and unmentioned till now is Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers which is barely a sci-fi novel to begin with and unlike DADOES, its film version is NOTHING like the novel and in fact rather than honoring the novel, the film seeks to repudiate and make fun of the novel (connecting the Starship Troopers film to DADOES, Paul Verhoven the Starship Troopers director also filmed Total Recall, a film version of We’ll Remember it for You Wholesale another Phillip K. Dick short story). The written work contains nothing of the “action” one would expect. Outside of a short battle scene at the very beginning of the novel and a somewhat longer one that concludes the work the vast majority of the book is alternatively a description of training and integration into the Mobile Infantry as well as what are long, descriptive viewpoints given by various authority figures under which the protagonist receives his tutelage. Many a critic has taken issue with this, seeing it as merely being a mouthpiece for the author to express his views on the military, evils of communism, and growing softness of the West in general. Others have taken it further and put the work under scrutiny for racism, misongynism, and all sorts of other perceived evil “isms”. Critics, like Verhoven the direct of the film “version” miss much of the underlying themes or care not to find value in them. Heinlein was a well known Libertarian…not a facist, not a racist (hell, the main character here is of Philippine lineage). Heinlein was also vehemently anti-communist—thus the communistic nature of the “bugs” that are fought here. Value is placed in sacrifice of self for the benefit of society and I can hardly think of a more “leftist” viewpoint…but that is ignored by critics because of the positive light the military is given. Here the military is the savior of society…not just a somewhat necessary evil that many liberal school indoctrinated critics and “artists” see it as. Pairing this work with Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a phenomenal start for anyone interested in looking at the world through eyes which do not distinguish between race, religion, or any other characteristic other than what an individual brings of value to their fellow humans. Great works both.

Too Old for Bad Books

So this is where I’ve gotten to be in life…

No longer am I willing to continue slogging through books in order to get to the end and claim that I’ve finished it, no matter how revered the book is or what status it may imbue upon me to be able to legitimately claim to have read it. Life is too short.

Up first on my “discontinue” list? Two revered books from completely different genres.

Initially I thought “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was going to be an interesting reflection and wise observation on the protagonist’s life intertwined with the focus and simple mechanics that make a motorcycle run. In reality it immediately devolves into the author’s cult like psychobabble that appeals only to those hippies who have dropped acid too many times to know the difference between good and bad material. The fact that this book has been purchased so many times only means there are a lot of brain dead people out there…Not worth my or your time…

I did get several hundred pages into the book because Pirsig weaves a thread into the work covering the protagonist’s (really Pirsig himself) travels with his son cross country on, yes, a motorcycle. This real world story is far more interesting than the metaphysical babble (author was a philosophy and journalism major and went to Zen conferences and studied “Eastern Thought”…) the author tries to impart as advice on his audience. The father-son interplay is far more interesting…but not enough to keep one reading

Second on my list? Another beloved work but here from the SciFi genre. As a youth there were always peer geeks who slavishly spoke about how great and how funny “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was. Maybe if I was an 11 year old boy I would have been able to finish this but certainly not now. Its not that I’m humorless, I find many things to be funny. It’s not that I don’t enjoy different strains of humor—Monty Python to Beavis and Butthead I find humor in. And geeky? Well I’ll have you know I think I still have some D20s rolling around my house somewhere. This work is just “silly”…and not in a good way. It is so nonsensical as to dull the wit. Words are fabricated, tangents are taken, non-sequiturs used…all to little effect. Adams (author) does not bring me in to care about Arthur Dent or Ford Prefect (the two main characters) and they remain cardboard cutouts of zero consequence in the first 100 pages where I left it off to be moronic and useless and sold on Amazon for 25 cents.

So there is my philosophy for the day…life is too short...there is too much rare good out there to spend time wasting with the popular bad…