Plot
The storyline involves two factions, both capable of time travel, engaged in long-term war with each other. Their method of battle involves changing the outcome of events throughout history.
The two opposing groups are nicknamed the Spiders and the Snakes. Their soldiers are recruited from various places and times: Cretan Amazons, Roman legionnaires, Hussars, Wehrmacht Landsers, American GIs, Space Commandos, and soldiers from the armies of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Stalin and may find themselves fighting side-by-side or on opposing sides. Likewise medical staff and entertainers are inducted into the temporal war to provide rest and relaxation for weary combatants.
The soldiers do not know how the war began or if it has an end. They also do not know the true form or identity of the Spiders or the Snakes. No one knows how those nicknames were chosen, or whether they are in any way accurate.
The action of the story occurs in a rest and relaxation base between the changing time lanes. The plot has the form of a locked room mystery.
Read more about this topic: The Big Time
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)