The soldiers, selected from all over time and space (Erich, a second world war-era Nazi Bruce, a poet sucked up from the mud of Passchendale in 1917 Mark, a Roman legionary Illy, an octopus-featured alien) converge on "the Place" through "the Door" (a portal into various other dimensions) when they're due some rest and recuperation from the battles they fight to alter the course of history. It's at this point that things get complicated/ridiculous depending on your tolerance for physics-twisting sci-fi concepts and the capitalised jargon that so often accompanies them. Sid and a few good-time girls like the narrator Greta Forzane (a refugee from late 20th-century Nazi-occupied Chicago) entertain soldiers on furlough from the front lines of an ongoing cosmic battle - the Change War. This location is "the Place", a bar and bordello presided over by a genial Elizabethan called Sid (who tells us he was "of an age with Shakespeare" and that "he was such a modest, mind your business rogue that we all wondered if he really did write those plays").
Unusually for sci-fi, it's set in just one location, almost as bare as the classic Shakespearean stage, and relies mainly on dialogue to convey the action and its intriguingly scrambled ideas.
The 1958 Hugo award winner The Big Time references the big man from Stratford more than any sci-fi book I've read.
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