What do you think?
Rate this book
Los que pecan
Cuando la Muchacha Asustada se acerca al burócrata Carr Mackay, no busca trabajo: escapa de algo. Ese algo anónimo y oscuro se aclara a medida que Carr corre con ella por las calles de Chicago, pierde la oportunidad de su vida, y gana la visión de la verdad. Nada ni nadie es lo que parece, todo entra en la Gran Máquina.
Entretanto Wilson, el líder; la Rubia Alta, y el Hombre Manco, un trío de villanos, espían y actúan sin que nadie los vea. Los acompaña la Sombra Negra, que desgarra y destruye.
Entretanto Wilson, el líder; la Rubia Alta, y el Hombre Manco, un trío de villanos, espían y actúan sin que nadie los vea. Los acompaña la Sombra Negra, que desgarra y destruye.
254 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
174 people want to read
About the author
Various
455k books1,341 followersVarious is the correct author for any book with multiple unknown authors, and is acceptable for books with multiple known authors, especially if not all are known or the list is very long (over 50).
If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.
Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.
Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 12, 2015
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.
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.
January 3, 2025
Prima opera che leggo di Fritz Leiber.
Il protagonista è un impiegato a cui, un giorno, la sua vita verrà completamente sconvolta dall'incontro con una bella ragazza terrorizzata da nemici che la inseguono: da quel momento il nostro amico scoprirà che la sua vita era tutta una farsa.
Sinceramente a me questa storia ha ricordato subito il film Matrix, anche se questo romanzo è uscito molto anni prima del film quindi sono stati quelli di Matrix ad ispirarsi a questo libro e non il contrario. Il tema di questa storia è una semplice domanda: e se gli esseri umani in realtà non sono altro che dei burattini o delle rotelle che vengono guidati o mossi dall'universo che è una macchina? La vicenda narrataci da Leiber mette al centro la solitudine e l'alienazione dell'uomo moderno.
Peccato per le forzature che l'autore ha aggiunto di tipo sessuale per poter vendere meglio, visto che questo suo romanzo è stato parecchio sfortunato (lo afferma lo stesso autore nella postfazione), forzature che hanno reso la storia sicuramente più hot (oggi si direbbe spicy) ma anche più ridicola e spesso disturbante. Un'altra cosa che ho ravvisato è che i personaggi sembrano freddi, senza anima, vivono come se fossero già morti. La stessa trama non è avvincente ma semplicemente i personaggi si spostano da un luogo all'altro a caso.
Il protagonista è un impiegato a cui, un giorno, la sua vita verrà completamente sconvolta dall'incontro con una bella ragazza terrorizzata da nemici che la inseguono: da quel momento il nostro amico scoprirà che la sua vita era tutta una farsa.
Sinceramente a me questa storia ha ricordato subito il film Matrix, anche se questo romanzo è uscito molto anni prima del film quindi sono stati quelli di Matrix ad ispirarsi a questo libro e non il contrario. Il tema di questa storia è una semplice domanda: e se gli esseri umani in realtà non sono altro che dei burattini o delle rotelle che vengono guidati o mossi dall'universo che è una macchina? La vicenda narrataci da Leiber mette al centro la solitudine e l'alienazione dell'uomo moderno.
Peccato per le forzature che l'autore ha aggiunto di tipo sessuale per poter vendere meglio, visto che questo suo romanzo è stato parecchio sfortunato (lo afferma lo stesso autore nella postfazione), forzature che hanno reso la storia sicuramente più hot (oggi si direbbe spicy) ma anche più ridicola e spesso disturbante. Un'altra cosa che ho ravvisato è che i personaggi sembrano freddi, senza anima, vivono come se fossero già morti. La stessa trama non è avvincente ma semplicemente i personaggi si spostano da un luogo all'altro a caso.
February 13, 2013
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."
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."
March 21, 2018
Fritz Leiber es un afamadísimo autor de fantasía y horror (fue parte del círculo lovecraftiano, uno de los tantos amigos por correspondencia con el Maestro de Providence), autor de una obra extensa -entre la que se destaca el ciclo Fafhrd y el Ratonero Gris, que nunca he leído- a quien yo conocía sobre todo por algunos cuentos sueltos incluídos en antologías y recopilaciones. La que hoy nos ocupa es la primera novela de Leiber que leo y es un trabajo sin dudas que peculiar. Los que pecan nos cuenta la historia de Carr MacKay un oscuro funcionario en una agencia de empleo, quien luego de un encuentro casual con una chica en la oficina se dará cuenta de que el mundo no es tal como lo conoce y que, en cambio, apartándose apenas de sus rutinas y formas podrá vislumbrarlo como verdaderamente es. Es muy difícil entrar en descripciones de la trama sin deschavar demasiado, sólo decir que Leiber crea una verdadera sensación de paranoia y pesadilla, una realidad de esas de tensión permanente -y que se asemeja y adelanta unos años a Los Usurpadores de Cuerpos que en cine desarrollaría Don Siegel- la que sostiene no pocas páginas. El gran problema es que parece enamorado de esa sensación, de ese clima, y la novela prácticamente avanza a velocidad de caracol herido, convencida de que esa atmósfera demencial alcanza y sobra para mantener el interés. ¿Es así? Y... sí, apenas, pero si. Para colmo, la situación se soluciona con algo muy parecido a un deus ex machina lo que a mi siempre me molesta particularmente. Un aspecto que llama la atención es lo gráficas y descriptivas que son varias escenas de sexo -pensando en una novela de 1953- pero en un interesantísimo postfacio del propio Leiber el asunto se aclara: fueron escenas incorporadas primero a pedido de los editores originales y para esta edición en particular -realizada en la década de los 80s- Leiber las reescribe y moderniza. Siempre es interesante conocer los entretelones de las obras.
February 4, 2014
For a random find at a used bookstore, an intriguing book. I have discovered the missing link between Lovecraft and Pratchett!
A bit repetitive, and dated in style, but it drew me along nonetheless. For example, at the beginning, the humorous metafiction elements, the narrative stepping outside of the story, play well with the underlying theme of the world being a clockwork that the character has stepped out of.
The writing is always engaging, with rich descriptive metaphors and allusions.
As for the sexed-up title, which Leiber did not choose, the epilog where Leiber describes the publication history is a story unto itself.
A bit repetitive, and dated in style, but it drew me along nonetheless. For example, at the beginning, the humorous metafiction elements, the narrative stepping outside of the story, play well with the underlying theme of the world being a clockwork that the character has stepped out of.
The writing is always engaging, with rich descriptive metaphors and allusions.
As for the sexed-up title, which Leiber did not choose, the epilog where Leiber describes the publication history is a story unto itself.
October 21, 2011
Classic Leiber novel. An interesting idea with dated execution. Worth reading if you're a Lieber completist or skimming if you're not. I suspect it would have made a much stronger short story (carving it down to around 10,000 words).
December 4, 2021
Starts out well, then flounders around seemingly trying to find itself but it never really does.
It's a shame Leiber was interrupted in the writing, and then later in the editing because this story has quite a bit of promise but sadly it's never realized.
Carr is working in an employment agency when he meets a plain Jane who nonetheless elicits interest in him. He feels he can help her. She's being inexplicably bullied by a Big Beautiful Blonde, but Jane insists that Carr ignore the blonde as Jane herself has done.
Jane insists on keeping her secrets which drives Carr all the harder to find them out. Eventually, after many days, and MANY clues, he does.
Just at the end, when it seems that Carr is about to make a new discovery, it all folds in upon itself and we're left with what I considered a dependable and disappointing, and normal ending.
Still, it's Fritz Leiber! So, in my opinion, it's definitely worth reading.
It's a shame Leiber was interrupted in the writing, and then later in the editing because this story has quite a bit of promise but sadly it's never realized.
Carr is working in an employment agency when he meets a plain Jane who nonetheless elicits interest in him. He feels he can help her. She's being inexplicably bullied by a Big Beautiful Blonde, but Jane insists that Carr ignore the blonde as Jane herself has done.
Jane insists on keeping her secrets which drives Carr all the harder to find them out. Eventually, after many days, and MANY clues, he does.
Just at the end, when it seems that Carr is about to make a new discovery, it all folds in upon itself and we're left with what I considered a dependable and disappointing, and normal ending.
Still, it's Fritz Leiber! So, in my opinion, it's definitely worth reading.
March 13, 2020
The concept was so cool, but the execution was at times strangely worded. Which may, as the author says in the afterword, be because his publisher changed whatever they wanted without his approval and he couldn’t do anything about it at the time. So yeah, the scenes where characters were intimate had a different tone than the rest of the book. But the Sci-Fi concept of being awakened in a world made of machines was awesome.
September 10, 2018
One of the worst books I have ever read.
February 27, 2019
Leiber's novel, originally published in 1950, holds too many similarities with Christopher Priest's "The Glamour" from 1984 to be a coincidence. Priest is by far the better writer stylistically, but there is something very satisfying about Leiber's pulpy urgency, and his ending, though not great, is better than Priest's po-mo cop-out.
May 6, 2009
A nice Leiber novel not set in the world of Lankemar. Quick read which keeps moving along at a nice pace. The twists are a bit telegraphed and you see them coming but don't detract from the overall theme that makes you think about the nature of the world and our path through it.
Want to read
August 6, 2016Primera edición en castellano de The Sinful Ones (1953), novela que el autor editó y corrigió en base a su relato You're All Alone (1950). Se publicó otra versión con nuevas correcciones en 1980. Colihue lo editó en 2003 dentro de su colección Nave Madre.
Read
April 14, 2008Horror,Anthology
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews