Customer Reviews

The Sinful Ones

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Carr McKay is a clerk at General Employment. One day, a frightened young woman comes in, asking if he's one of "them," and if he's been "awakened." Carr has no idea what she is talking about. A few minutes later, a man sits at Carr's desk, pretending to smoke a cigarette, and answering employment-type questions like he's talking to an invisible person. One of Carr's colleagues suddenly starts ignoring him. His original thought is that this is some kind of strange joke, He soon learns differently.

The woman, Jane, tries to keep him out of it, but Carr eventually learns that everyone has a "pattern" that they're expected to follow throughout life. As long as a person stays in their pattern, everything is fine. When a person does omething unexpected, or otherwise goes out of their pattern, it's like they aren't just invisible, they suddenly don't exist, until they return to their pattern. In other words, the universe is a giant machine.

I really enjoyed this book. It's very thought provoking, and Leiber is a great author, so this is also very well done. For something short, and very different, this is the book.

The novel "The Sinful Ones" has a convoluted history that has been documented by the author in an afterword to the 1980 Pocket paperback edition. The story was written in 1943 but was not published until 1950 in the science fiction magazine Fantastic Adventures. Th origional title was "You Are Not Alone" and ran about 75 pages in the magazine version. Leiber reworked and expanded the story and it was reissued as "The Sinful Ones". My paperback edition was 170 pages a significant expansion of the origional version. Not having the shorter version to compare I'm can only state my oppinion of the longer version.

I found novel "The Sinful Ones" by Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) uninteresting, convoluted and stuffed with unnecessary dialog and descriptive passages that contributed little to the story line. Per chance a "psychological thriller" with supernatural overtones was a hot topic in the 1950's but I could not buy in to the author's viewpoint. Perhaps it was the fact that until page 93 we, the readers, were finally let in on the BIG MYSTERY which was frankly quite an anticlimax.

As a long time reader of science fiction I was pleased to read this very early effort by Fritz Leiber. Nonetheless I would not recommend it to new readers unfamiliar with his major works.

I didn't know quite what to expect from this one. Should have known that Frtiz Leiber would not disappoint. It's the story of a man who "wakes up" to find that the world around him is not the one he has known and lived in all his life. Shades of "The Matrix", "Dark City" and a lot of older stories.

The main character is a 39 year-old interviewer for some sort of employment service. A girl he meets is his guide to the strange and frightening world. A world of automatons and sinful ones. The wall-eyed blond, the young man without a hand, the affable seeming older man. And the beast. The setting is Chicago in the 50's and, while I'm not familiar with the city, it seems a good evocation of the era.

Interesting to note that Leiber rewrote the sex scenes, t least in the version I read. Apparently the original publishers did the same thing to him in the 50's! So they are fairly modern. But what is the Triangle of Venus?

Leiber combines two interesting ideas, actually--the absolute impossibility of proving that other minds exist, and the mass-production of human minds in the modern world. Unfortunately, the story itself is full of coincidences, narrow escapes, and other melodramatics. And the explanation of how the few "alive" people can co-exist with the "dead" world is not very convincing.

Fairly enjoyable. It was a very fast read and really didn't draw me in like some other books. Its a decently enjoyable book for a one time read.