You're All Alone

First published: 1953 (as The Sinful Ones; serial form, “You’re All Alone,” Fantastic Adventures, 1950; magazine version as title story of a three-story collection, You’re All Alone, 1972; longer version re-edited as The Sinful Ones, 1980)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Fantasy—closed universe

Time of work: Unspecified, but seemingly the 1950’s

Locale: Chicago, Illinois

The Plot

You’re All Alone was to have been Fritz Leib-er’s third novel, following his successful Conjure Wife (1953; serial form, Unknown, 1943) and Gather, Darkness! (1950; serial form, Astounding Stories, 1943). He began it in 1943, the year the others appeared in magazines edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. He was four chapters into it when Campbell informed him that Unknown was ceasing publication because of World War II paper shortages. Lacking other fantasy markets, Leiber retired the manuscript until the late 1940’s, when he spent four years off and on expanding it to a seventy-five-thousand-word novel. Frederik Pohl, his agent, sold it to Fantastic Adventures, with the requirement that it be cut to forty thousand words. Pohl later sold the longer version as half of a double-novel volume to Universal Publishers, where editors made several of its love scenes more explicit in what Leiber called the “soft porn” style of the 1950’s. In 1972, Ace published the shorter version with two of Leiber’s novelettes, after Leiber bought back the longer story from Universal for the same $500 he had been paid for it. He further revised the work, which came out as a Pocket Books paperback in 1980 as The Sinful Ones. Leiber later wrote that “ill-starred” was too kind a description for what happened to his “two-headed” third novel.

The story opens with employment agency interviewer Carr Mackey becoming intrigued by Jane, a frightened young woman who stops at his desk in an attempt to throw off pursuers. She is trying to blend into the mechanical world in which most people are only automatons, following predestined patterns with no realization of it. She is shocked to find that Carr actually sees her, because she is outside the pattern. She realizes that he, too, is truly alive. Most of those who discover that everyone around them is acting out a life in an undeviating pattern take advantage of the situation, looting whatever they want and using human pawns as their playthings; they band together in small groups to eliminate the potential competition of other “real” people.

Gradually, Carr realizes the situation, despite his attempts to rationalize what he sees when he, too, steps out of the pattern. Jane at first tries to keep him from deviating and thereby becoming a target himself, but finally she falls in love with him.

Their pursuers, two men, a woman, and a vicious animal (a hound in the shorter version, a cheetah in the longer), finally track them down but become victims of another group. Free of anyone who would know their place in the pattern, Carr and Jane return to it once they realize they are destined to meet in it. They decide to find and rouse other half-wakened people with a penchant toward goodness rather than cruelty. This is made more clear in the longer, more leisurely version; the shorter version ends with a vivid physical climax, in which Carr shoots the hound an instant before it would have killed Jane.