All My Sins Remembered
Author: Joe Haldeman
Genre: Science Fiction
Year: 1977
Rating: 5 of 10
I wish that I had started my exploration of Haldeman with Forever War, as I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. However my first experience with him is All My Sin Remembered and while I didn’t hate it I found it disappointing. The story follows an agent who frequently goes through body modification and hypnotic imprints of the personalities of his marks. The book jumped around from mission to mission without much correlation between scenarios making me wonder throughout reading it when it was going to get to the point. I kept waiting for a payoff that never came. Parts of the book were enjoyable and there was nothing wrong with the story it just didn’t really go anywhere. A few days after finishing the book it occurred to me that perhaps Haldeman was attempting, buy jumping around so much, to make the reader feel the disorientation of the protagonist, who essentially loses his identity because of the nature of his job. While this could have been a clever devise it failed to produce the desired result.