Influences
Leiber's short story "Try and change the past", also from 1958, is set in the same universe. It features a New York man just recruited by the Snakes going AWOL and trying to change his personal past in which he was murdered by his wife, finding out that the universe resists all his efforts and "conserving reality" in various improbable ways, and finally not having any choice but going back to fight in the Time War.
During 1965, Poul Anderson developed the same theme, a time war fought between two powerful factions who confront each other throughout time and use people of past periods as their soldiers, in the story "The Corridors of Time".
Read more about this topic: The Big Time
Famous quotes containing the word influences:
“Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education, feel a politely disguised contempt for it; and thus the study of one of the most pervasive and powerful influences on human life is traduced and neglected.”
—Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
“I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)
“Do not seek anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)