Spratt.Multics@MIT-MULTICS@sri-unix.UUCP (08/25/83)
Fritz Leiber wrote a series of stories known as the Change War stories. I have these stories in two places; one is a book called "The Big Time", the other is in the collection called "The Best of Fritz Lieber". There may be a book titled "The Change War". The basic situation of the change war is that there are two sides, the snakes and the spiders. Each is trying to change the past to eliminate the other side (entirely or just in part). It is extremely difficult to make changes in the past which "the universe" won't adjust for so as to leave "the universe" unaltered after the changed event. No one knows where the two sides came from originally, and there are no categorical differences between the sides. They are both vicious and greedy, venal in the extreme. People are forced to join a side, given death as their only alternative (what happens with respect to a recruit's death is one of Leiber's many interesting inventions). A fascinating and depressing milieu.