This book was a nice change of pace from the war stories I have been reading lately.   Although it takes place during a war, the fighting takes place in the background, and the setting is more like a USO operation than a battlefield.           The “big time” in the title is the Big Time War – a campaign that is fought all through time, from eons in the past (before there were humans) to far into the future (where the humans may not be quite human anymore). Tactics involve changing events or capturing people from the past to change the future and to take out agents of the other side, say by killing their grandfather before he had children. The two sides in this time war are known as the Spiders and the Snakes.   Nobody knows why they are named thusly, or where or when they come from, or why they are at war.           The events of the story all take place in the Place, a kind of pocket of stabilized time pinched off from the main timeline. Changes in the main timelin