All My Sins Remembered was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1977, a fix-up novel assembled from connected stories. The protagonist, Otto McGavin, is an agent for the Confederation’s “prime operative” division — a secret intelligence service that uses advanced conditioning technology to overlay new personalities onto its agents, allowing them to assume any identity required for a mission.
Each mission is a complete personality: McGavin becomes someone else — their memories, their reflexes, their emotional patterns — and performs actions that “he” (as Otto) might find repugnant. The overlay is supposedly temporary, but each mission leaves residue: fragments of other selves that accumulate, competing memories that blur, and a progressive inability to locate his original identity beneath the layers of imposed personalities.
Haldeman draws directly on the psychological literature of Vietnam veterans — identity fragmentation, moral injury, the sense of having done things that feel committed by someone else — and gives it a science fiction mechanism that makes the metaphor literal. The novel asks whether there is a stable self beneath experience, or whether identity is simply the accumulation of actions and memories, which means that someone who has been many people may end up being no one.
Collecting All My Sins Remembered
First edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1977): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Signed first edition: $30–$70
- Without jacket: $5–$10