All My Sins Remembered

Haldeman, Joe (Joseph W.). All My Sins Remembered. New York: St. Martin's Press, [1977]. New York: Avon, 1978. "The stories 'To Fit the Crime' and 'The Only War We've Got' appeared in rather different form in Galaxy magazine...1971, 1974" (copyright page).

Especially useful, "Episode: All My Sins Remembered" and "Interview: Age 45" (the end of the book). Explicitly raises questions of identity and free will, and the degree to which a person can be "programmed" (JH's word) to commit atrocities. Machines are used in the "personality overlays" (Avon edn. 162), and in the Interview Categorys (220-1). The concluding title story contains bitter satire on bureaucracy and a scene of the hero in a hospital bed "with the doctor machine sealed over his thorax." The envoi, "Interview: Age 45," ends with the hero in a mechanical womb, about to be killed.