The Big Time was the only novel in Leiber's "Change War" series, about a vast cosmic time war between implacable enemies, but he published a number of short works in the same milieu, and I liked The Big Time enough to track them down. There's no one collection that reprints all of them, as far as I can tell, so I picked up the most recent collection with most of them... which is from over 35 years ago! (I'm learning that outside of the Lankhmar stories, Leiber isn't kept in print very well.*) Changewar contains seven Change War stories (the space must have been a victim of a timeline revision), some of which revisit characters from The Big Time, but most of which look at different aspects of the conflict.

Of the seven, I would say I liked about half of them. "Try and Change the Past" is a pretty prototypical sf premise at this point: no matter what you do, history will correct itself it. But it's well told and enjoyable, and it introduces the Change War concept pretty well, so it makes for a good opener. I also really liked "The Oldest Soldier," about a guy who really likes soldiers but has never fought himself being inadvertently drawn into the weirdest rear guard action imaginable. "No Great Magic" was neat, too, about an amnesiac in a New York City theatre: only something much more complicated than she can imagine is happening. This is the longest story in the book, but I wanted it to be longer, actually! It ends with her figuring out what is going on, and I would have gladly read about what happened next had Leiber decided to expand it. I think the premise is great, and he doesn't fully exploit its possibilities within this short space.

Others, like a lot of sf, had a good idea not much was done with. "Knight to Move" has some cool concepts in it, and a strong narrative voice, but isn't much of a story; "When the Change-Winds Blow" is evocatively told, but its connections to the actual Change War concept seem pretty scant.

"A Deskful of Girls" was the only one I really didn't like. One of those sf stories where what is going on isn't very clear, but when you can glimpse it, it isn't very interesting either. Like "When the Change-Winds Blow," its connection to the Change War seemed minimal, as well.

As I said in my review of The Big Time, Leiber apparently did not invent the idea of a "time war" but he did popularize it. One might imagine that someone writing forty years before Doctor Who spent decades exploring this concept would read as old hat, but I found that Leiber did a lot of cool, interesting stuff with the concept, and I wish he had done more.

* The two missing stories are "Black Corridor," last reprinted in 1988 (in English, anyway), and "The Haunted Future," last reprinted in 1990.

Intenta cambiar el pasado; Un escritorio lleno de chicas; La mañana de la condenación; El soldado más veterano; No es una gran magia, Cuando soplan los vientos del cambio; Movimiento de caballo.

while I have very fond memories of "The Big Time" by the same author, this anthology of short pieces from the same universe, has nothing much to recommend it. I'm sorry to be so negative about an author I generally hold very highly. ( )

The Change War sprawls across all time, its combatants the alien Spiders and Snakes. The object? Well, no one is completely sure and that includes the humans drafted into fighting it. They've rationalized why they must fight because they really don't have much choice. (The most famous installment in the series, Leiber's novel The Big Time, does end with a possible explanation for the war.)

This is a looser collection of series stories than you would normally expect. Given the nature of the Change War, there is not a clear chronology. Many stories do not share any characters with each other or The Big Time. There are a couple of stories which do not obviously seem part of the series except, of course, Leiber tells us they are by putting them in the book. All the stories stand on their own and offer varying sorts of pleasure, so the collection is worth reading apart from being a Change War collection.

"Try and Change the Past" was the first short story written for the series and cleverly works out one of the basic ideas behind the series: the Law of the Conservation of Reality. A new Snake recruit tries to avoid getting drafted by changing history - specifically his wife fatally shooting him. The story can be seen as an answer to Ray Bradbury's famous "A Sound of Thunder".

The narrator of "The Oldest Soldier" is -- rather like Leiber himself -- philosophically and temperamentally inclined to pacifism. But he's accepted the necessity of war and has set out to learn military history and hangs out with veterans at a local Chicago bar. But they're not all WWII veterans. One tells stories of the Change War.

"Damnation Morning" has an alcoholic checking into a hotel room to commit suicide and getting an unpleasant life review by a Snake recruiter.

"When the Change-Winds Blow" is one of the stories that don't obviously seem part of the Change War conflict. A man on Mars sees a vision of a Gothic cathedral. It's a beautiful story mixing literature (the story of Robert and Elizabeth Browning), architecture, and the mourning for dead loved ones.

"Knight to Move" is a playful story featuring ex-Nazi soldier Erich von Hohenwald (featured prominently in The Big Time), a chess tournament, and speculation on how the games a culture plays show whether Snakes or Spiders have been manipulating them.

"A Deskful of Girls" is a creepy, erotic novelette on the mystery, allure, origin, and manipulation of sexual charisma. The narrator meets one Dr. Emil Slyker, an unpleasant psychotherapist who also fancies himself a black magician and has some blackmail material on one of his patients, a megastar and sex symbol. But the narrator finds out that Slyker isn't the quack he first seems. And Slyker is also in for some surprises. It's Leiber's comment on "1950s sex goddesses".

Unlike "A Deskful of Girl", "No Great Magic" has a quite obvious connection to the Change War because it features the same narrator as The Big Time, Greta, and several of the novel's characters also appear here. This time, though, Greta finds herself amnesiac and serving as a wardrobe mistress for a theatrical troupe in New York City. The company undertakes a bizarre performance of Macbeth with an added, anachronistic prologue by Queen Elizabeth and odd costuming. A very entertaining mixture of Shakespeare, theater life, and plot surprises that reminded me strongly of another Leiber story, "Four Ghosts in Hamlet".

While I'd recommend this collection to anyone not familiar with the Change War series, completists looking for all of the series may be a bit deceived by the promise of this book's cover. As near as I can tell from various bibliographic sources, it does not collect all the Change War stories. The Change War collects all the short stories - though the connection of a couple of its stories to the series escapes me. If you buy Changewar and the Ace Double The Big Time / The Mind Spider & Other Stories, you'll have all but one of the stories in the series. ( )

Vi presentiamo per la prima volta in assoluto in Italia, la raccolta di racconti della Guerra del Cambio Changewar, la raccolta del 1978 che riunisce in un volume tutte le storie del ciclo della Guerra del Cambio, in ordine logico.
Nel 1958 pubblica The Big Time (Il grande tempo, gia' realizzato dalla fantastica BdB) che insieme a questi racconti compone quello che viene definito il ciclo di Change-War (Guerra del Cambio): si tratta della storia di un conflitto temporale per determinare il corso del futuro tra 'Snake', (Serpenti), e 'Spider', (Ragni), (non verrà mai detto chi siano veramente) che ha come campo di battaglia lo spazio e il tempo. Ragni e Serpenti saltano avanti e indietro per cercare di modificare la storia a proprio favore. A questa guerra partecipano umani provenienti da epoche diverse, recrutati come soldati, che vengono e si incontrano nel The Place, un luogo di servizio per soldati affaticati dalla guerra, in un universo dove la guerra di secessione non ha nai avuto luogo e i nazisti hanno vinto la seconda guerra mondiale.
Nei racconti Leiber mostra azioni di guerra compiute da agenti esperti ed effetti del Vento del Cambio visti da chi non sa nulla della guerra, innocenti coinvolti in agguati tesi da creature misteriose ed esperti ufficiali che si fronteggiano in territorio neutrale ricorrendo all’astuzia, non potendo usare le armi. Il tutto nello stile ipnotico, musicale e avvolgente di Leiber, che riesce come pochi a creare atmosfere horror, umoristiche e sensuali e a passare dall’una all’altra agilmente. Senza far pesare i ragguagli scientifici o i dati tecnici ma puntando di piu' sulla sua dimensione scientifico-filosofica.