| "—All You Zombies—" | |
|---|---|
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Published in | Fantasy and Science Fiction |
| Publication date | 1959 |
"—All You Zombies—" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein. It was written in one day, July 11, 1958, and first published in the March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine after being rejected by Playboy.
The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel. In 1980, it was nominated for the Balrog Award for short fiction.[1]
"—All You Zombies—" further develops themes explored by the author in a previous work: "By His Bootstraps", published some 18 years earlier. Some of the same elements also appear later in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1988), including the Circle of Ouroboros and the Temporal Corps.
Contents |
"'—All You Zombies—'" chronicles a young man (later revealed to be intersex) taken back in time and tricked into impregnating his younger, female self (before he underwent a sex change); he thus turns out to be the offspring of that union, with the paradoxical result that he is his own mother and father. As the story unfolds, all the major characters are revealed to be the same person, at different stages of her/his life.
The story involves an intricate series of time-travel journeys. It begins with a young man speaking to the narrator, the Bartender, in 1970. The young man is called the Unmarried Mother, because he writes stories for confession magazines, many of them presumably from the point of view of an unmarried mother.
Cajoled by the Bartender, the Unmarried Mother explains why he understands the female viewpoint so well: he was born a girl, in 1945, and raised in an orphanage. While a fairly ugly teenager in 1963, he (that is, she) was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by an older man. During the delivery of her child, doctors discovered she had an intersex condition: internally, she had both male and female sex organs. Complications during delivery forced them to give her a sex change. The baby was later kidnapped and not seen again. The now-former girl had to adjust to being a man and surviving as such, despite being unprepared for any job. As a girl he/she had preferred etiquette lessons, hoping to join an organization dedicated to providing "comfort and companionship" to astronauts, known at various times by the elaborate acronyms "W.E.N.C.H.E.S." (Women's Emergency National Corps, Hospitality & Entertainment Section), "A.N.G.E.L.S." (Auxiliary Nursing Group, Extraterrestrial Legions), and the Women's Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen (the only name without its acronym spelled out in the story, "W.H.O.R.E.S."). Handicapped by the physical aftereffects of childbirth, he used his secretarial skills to type manuscripts, and eventually began writing.
Professing sympathy, the Bartender offers to top his story. He guides him into a back room, and casts a net over the two of them. This is part of a time machine. The young man is set loose in 1963 where he dates, falls for, seduces, impregnates, and leaves a young girl; at the same time the Bartender goes forward eleven months, kidnaps a baby and takes it to an orphanage in 1945. He then returns to 1963, and picks up the Unmarried Mother, who is just beginning to realize what has happened. As the Bartender tells him, "Now you know who he is—and after you think it over you'll know who you are . . . and if you think hard enough, you'll figure out who the baby is . . . and who I am."
The Bartender then drops the Unmarried Mother—his younger self—at an outpost of the Temporal Bureau, a time-traveling secret police force that causes events in history to protect the human race. He has just recruited himself.
Finally the Bartender returns to 1970, arriving a short time after he left the bar. He allows a customer to play "I'm My Own Grandpa" on the jukebox, having yelled at the customer for playing the song before he left. Closing the bar he time travels again to his home base. As he beds down for a much deserved rest, he contemplates the scar left over from the Caesarean section performed when he gave birth to his daughter, father, mother and entire history. He thinks "I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?".
It is noteworthy that the title of the story, which properly written includes both the quotation marks and the dashes, is actually a quotation from a sentence near the end of the story itself (taken from the middle of the sentence, hence the dashes indicating edited text before and after the title). In this way it mirrors the life of the protagonist, whose life is a "quotation" from itself.