Fritz Leiber’s You're All Alone

Fritz Leiber’s You're All Alone has a fascinating history. It was written between 1943 and 1947 as a 75,000 word novel which was never published and the manuscript was lost. He then rewrote it from scratch as a 40,000 word novella in which form it appeared in Fantastic Adventures in July 1950. In 1953 it was published as The Sinful Ones, with quite a few changes that were made without the author’s consent. The story was sexed-up quite a bit. In 1962 Galaxy published a short story by Leiber, The Big Engine, which is in fact a chapter from another version of the novel. In 1980 Leiber partially rewrote the unauthorised 1953 novel which was then published in an authorised version, again with the title The Sinful Ones.

Oddly enough most of these many versions of the story are fairly easily obtainable.

Armchair Fiction have published the 1950 novella version of You're All Alone in one of their terrific two-novel paperback editions (paired with Bernard C. Gilford’s novella The Liquid Man). This is the version I’m reviewing here.

Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) is one of the greatest of American science fiction and fantasy writers and arguably has never really gained the attention he deserves.

You're All Alone is disorienting brain-twisting stuff right from the start. Carr Mackay is a perfectly ordinary guy working in an employment agency. One day a very frightened young woman comes into the office. He has no idea why she’s frightened although it seems to have something to do with a tall blonde.

Then one of his workmates, Tom, introduces him to a girl, only there isn’t any girl. The guy is talking to the empty air. Carr tries to explain things to his boss but his boss doesn’t seem to notice that Carr is there. People talking to other people who don’t exist is bad enough, but Carr starts to wonder if he himself exists.

Things get stranger. His girlfriend Marcia rings to thank him for a lovely evening, but he never kept that particular date. Tom talks about the great time that Carr had with the girl on the double date the previous night, but Carr wasn’t there.

Pianos play, but no-one is playing them.

And there was that store mannequin. Can a shop-window mannequin look terrified?

He meets the frightened girl. She explains a few things to him, and now he’s more mystified than ever.

Has he gone crazy? Is the whole world crazy? Is the world real? Is he real?

And there are plenty of twists still to come.

It’s easy to see why Leiber was unwilling to abandon this story even when early on it seemed destined to remain unpublished. It’s a great story idea and it was worth reworking it. This is the only one of the several versions of the story that I’ve read and it works very neatly indeed. I am somewhat tempted to track down one of the two versions of The Sinful Ones.

Apart from the brain-twisting science fictional elements there’s a kind of very offbeat love story here as well, and the question of what constitutes reality plays a part in that as well.

It’s not necessary to worry overmuch about plausible science in this tale. This is more a philosophical (perhaps even slightly existentialist) story than a straight science fiction story. It’s the sort of thing Leiber did extremely well.

You're All Alone is excellent stuff. Highly recommended.