An interesting but uninvolving fantasy novel founded on the following premise: since we can't directly perceive the inner lives of others, we don't really know for sure that they have any, and it may be that other human beings are literally automatic contrivances which only give the appearance of conscious action: "The universe was a machine. The people in it, save for a very few, were mindless mechanisms, clockwork things of flesh and bone. So long as you made the proper clockwork motions, they seemed to react intelligently. But when you stopped, they went on just the same. When you quit being part of the clockworks, they ignored you."Leiber focusses on the loneliness and alienation inevitably following on an "awakening" from this illusion of meaningful human interaction, but his most inspired notion is that most of the "awake" would ruthlessly exploit the peculiar freedom which they enjoy relative to the oblivious "clockwork" people. For example, it is implied that one of the "awake" characters likes to follow "clockwork" girls around while masturbating––and he's one of the novel's good guys. When the "awake" aren't stealing or engaging in mutual destruction, they amuse themselves by acting sadistically toward the passive automatons.In an afterword Leiber comments that this was the "unluckiest, the most ill-starred and dogged by misfortune" of his novels. It was conceived and partially written in the early 1940s as a successor to Gather, Darkness! but was shelved when Unknown magazine, its intended market, went belly up. It was revived ten years later as a paperback original, but the publisher partly rewrote it to make it more salacious, dropping Leiber's original (and far more appropriate) title, You're All Alone. Leiber finally prepared this last, still somewhat compromised edition in the 1980s. Given its distinctly tormented history, it's not too surprising that the book has some problems. It's disconcerting to encounter 1980s sexual explicitness in a novel which is otherwise firmly rooted in the early 1940s. (In preparing this edition Leiber decided to keep the unauthorized 1953 sexual content, but rewrote it to suit 1980s sensibilities). It leaves you wondering if this is how vintage pulp would read if it had emerged from a less sexually inhibited society.The novel also feels padded. Its protagonist keeps confusedly moving in and out of the "clockwork" world until he finally comes to terms with his special "awakeness", long after the reader is already comfortable with the idea. When Leiber first undertook to salvage the story in the late 1940s he doubled it in length, and presumably the impression one gets that the plot's wheels are spinning pointlessly from time to time is a consequence of this. But the biggest reservation I have is the one alluded to at the beginning of this review: the book is excessively cold. Leiber seems content to expound his ideas without involving us with his characters, or furnishing a lively plot; there are some fine descriptive passages in which Leiber evokes bleak urban landscapes with his customary skill, but these don't compensate for the overall tone of morose abstraction.And yet it may well be one of his most personal works. There is a sprinkling of autobiographical touches throughout, and at one point his hero denounces the automatons in terms which strongly imply the novel's central concept emerged from Leiber's own loathing for the materialistic values and emptiness of "normal" society, spiced with an odd, Lovecraftian hint of cosmic fear: "Those idiots! What right had they to create a society in which brashness and machine-efficiency alone counted, in which the unambitious and fleshly-soft were tortured? Blind as bats to the truly important things of life. Jigging and hip-wagging like cogs and pistons while the world went God knows where. Sneering and jibing while time stole days from everyone and wouldn't give them back. Fighting for crumbs of prestige, while unknown dangers, like black sea monsters, silently circled mankind's vessel."All in all, it's a surprisingly sophisticated novel of ideas, given the market for which it was created. It's too bad it doesn't work all that well as a story, but I respect Leiber for having attempted it, and I'm glad he finally rescued it from oblivion.
Definitely worth a read if you're a Leiber fan. It's about Carr Mackey, a 39-year-old man in a humdrum job -- not even a job, but a job about jobs, an interviewer in "the General Employment" office -- whose encounter with a nervous young woman leads him to a terrifying realization: The universe is mechanical, and everyone is a kind of robot. As a novel it's uneven, with cardboard villains, a formulaic cat-and-mouse game, and at times unconvincing vacillations in a man who, even given the enormity of the truth he so badly wants not to believe, still proves to be conveniently obtuse at times depending on the needs of the plot. It's further complicated by its publication history: After expanding it to novel length for a paperback double, it was revised without the author's consent with a new title, lurid chapter titles and sleazed-up content (which may or may not include an elderly couple's cat named Gigolo). Still, it offers plenty of weirdness (a character who conceals herself in the bowels of the Chicago Public Library; the glimpses of people's automatism) for lovers of weird fiction and cosmic ruminations more relevant than ever in a time when science has shown so much of the world to be not only describable, but possibly reducible to natural laws acting on so much stuff. Leiber seems to have set an impossible goal of settling on a single interpretation of Mackey's discovery, and the novel suffers from a bit of a curt and formulaic ending. But I still give it four stars, because of the power of his writing and his head-on confrontation with a kind of conspiracy against the human race long before "The Matrix" became popular. It's a solid novel of paranoia with a grim view of human urges (admittedly some of these might have been written in by the publisher without authorial consent). It could almost be the stand-out of a subgenre of weird fiction that never came to be... I look forward to reading the author's original novella version of the same premise in "You're All Alone."
