The Big Time is a novel of ambitious ideas held back by a flimsy plot, and frankly terrible characters.

The epynomymous 'Big Time' is a cosmological war between Snakes and Spiders, fought using time travel across billions of years of history. The two sides recruit human beings as soldiers and agents, snipping their timelines to turn them into Demons, Ghosts, and Dopplegangers. Anachronistic teams of warriors alter history at critical points, trying to ensure the Change Winds lead to the "right" future, even as a the law of Conversation of Reality pushes against any truly dramatic changes in events.

There is a really neat philosophical background, but the actual plot is far less interesting. The story takes place in a Recuperation Station, a smallish bubble of spacetime where soldiers recover between operations. The permanent staff picks up a group of three soldiers who were on the losing side of a battle to capture and guide Einstein's development, then make an emergency pick-up of another trio who were at a battle near ancient Crete. There's an argument, the group decides that their side (the Spiders) is losing, one person declares they should mutiny and declare peace, someone sabotages the Maintainer and Introverts the Place, cutting off all contact between it and the universe. One of the soldiers triggers an atomic bomb with a 30 minute timer, our narrator figures out how to unsabotage The Place, they deactivate the timebomb, and there's a little philosophizing about how the Change War isn't a war at all, but some kind of cosmological evolution.

So as it related to the story, the Big Time setting is almost irrelevant, and what we have is a bottle episode set in the Place. Bottle episodes live and die by their characters, and the cast of 12 (6 Entertainment staff, two trios of soldiers) is too many people to treat each one in detail in the page count. They're all crude stereotypes of their eras. Our narrator is decent enough; she seems to genuinely like her job and has some talent at putting psychologically scarred soldiers together, but the only other one with any real flair is Erich the Nazi, and that's simply because he's an absolutely vile person presented as an ally. The characters fight, fall in love, betray each other, like they're dolls pushed around by some outside force. And in the end, it doesn't matter, not even on local subjective time.

I think the most telling bit is that it's less than 24 hours since I finished the book, and I can barely remember what happened, or why.