All My Sins Remembered

Otto McGavin is a young spiritual pacifist who comes under the employ of the 'Confederación', a galactic 'peace-keeping' organization. After lengthy training under hypnosis, he discovers that his role is not what he thought it would be, and is instead going to be used as both a spy and assassin, something that they call a 'prime operator'. Technology and espionage have advanced to such a degree that Otto will be physically and mentally altered into a near identical copy of a person of interest, and then inserted into the mission as seamlessly as possible. The book itself is a series of short story vignettes describing various missions that Otto is dispatched on, with interstitial material of interviews that Otto's handlers have with him at various points in his life.

As time progresses and Otto begins to be worn to the bone by the machinery of corrupt and unethical government, we begin to see the cracks forming that will ultimately destroy him. Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, uses Otto's story as a fairly venomous analogy for the American military complex and foreign policy overreach. I've yet to read Haldeman's more famous work, The Forever War, but I've gathered that it has a similar message, a message that is unfortunately still very much relevant almost 50 years later.

The primary fault here is the unevenness of the writing quality. The first two short stories, written as such in magazines in 1971 and 1974, read more as pulpy spy thrillers than anything of real importance, the only connection between them being Otto himself. The quality improves drastically with the concluding story, which ended up saving the novel from from being yet another mediocre fix-up. The last story, and the interstitial interviews, do a much better job of deepening the character of Otto, giving the reader a broader context of the bureau that he works for, and clarifying the message the Haldeman has. Unfortunately, it's just not enough to make the novel great. The final product doesn't feel cohesive as a whole. The book also has a pretty big case of characters delivering long chunks of exposition while having one or two glasses of bourbon, which I've been seeing more and more of in these older SF stories. Weird that there's ALWAYS a booze bar no matter what backwater planet you end up on.

That being said, it was a decent read. There's a lot of dark and gritty content that I thought was written in a mature fashion, and decent pace that kept things interesting. The final story has some really interesting aliens that live on a system with a star that goes through periods of decay and activity. These aliens are essential immortal, having no way to reproduce, but go through a process of rejuvenation during their star's period of decay. Cool stuff. I look forward to reading The Forever War and seeing what Haldeman is like at his best.