All You Zombies

Most science fiction—or sci-fi or speculative fiction—deals with the following issue: What would happen to people and society if advanced technology was available? What, for example, would happen if people could transport themselves instantly from one place to another? What if society could predict future crimes? What if humankind was immortal? What if humankind could travel back and forth through time?

That last question is the one posed in the sci-fi short story “All You Zombies—” by Robert Heinlein. The main character is a time traveler who goes back to his own past and manipulates events so that he gives birth to himself and thereby preserves his own existence.

The story explores the implications of time paradoxes. The most famous such conundrum involves someone who travels back in time, meets his parents before he was born, and kills them. Does this mean he ceases to exist? If so, then he never goes back in time to kill his own parents, and they give birth to him, and he grows up to go back in time and kill his parents, and the cycle repeats over and over.

In “All You Zombies—,” the narrator does the opposite: He takes actions involving his own past that help to ensure that he survives. The story suggests that his work as a time agent has, more than once, helped save humanity from disaster; thus, protecting his own timeline is critical to doing the good work of saving others.

He wears a ring shaped like an Ouroboros, a snake that eats its own tail. This symbolizes the essentially paradoxical work he must do: kidnap the baby, seduce her when she grows up, take him back to the scene of the seduction, and kidnap the baby, in an eternal cycle. Like the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, where each move in the game stems from one of the other moves, the narrator’s history depends on events that depend on earlier events in a loop. Painter MC Escher explained this artistically by creating images that visualized logical loops: two hands drawing each other, for example, or a staircase that spirals upward, and, after one complete turn, ends up where it started.

Two details make the story’s time paradox possible—time travel and Jane’s dual sex organs. As a hermaphrodite, she becomes pregnant but loses her female parts during the delivery; later, as a man, he goes back in time to impregnate his earlier female self. Finally, he kidnaps Jane’s baby (himself) and moves the baby back in time to an orphanage where she grows up to become Jane.

The Unmarried Mother recalls his attempt, as a teenage girl, to become a member of the sexual comfort group W.E.N.C.H.E.S., a quasi-military organization that serviced astronauts on long space journeys. Heinlein published “All You Zombies—” (1959) two years after the Russians launched Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite, and he realized that astronauts soon would be orbiting Earth as well. He assumed, over-generously, that long-haul space operations would already be under way by 1970. Such ventures have remained rare well into the 21st century; meanwhile, possible sexual activity aboard the International Space Station remains cloaked in secrecy.

After a stint as a Naval officer, Heinlein got into the writing business, mainly juvenile sci-fi: Starman Jones, Have Spacesuit—Will Travel, and many others. In 1959, he also published his first young adult novel, Starship Troopers, which dealt with more grown-up topics like political philosophy, corporal and capital punishment, and the violence of war.

While writing outside of juvenile books, Heinlein proved to be way ahead of his time on sexuality and alternative lifestyles. Open relationships are common in his later works, and strong female characters anchor many of them. “All You Zombies—,” with its trailblazing discussion of sex reassignment, fits snugly into Heinlein’s evolution as a daring and controversial author.

The Unmarried Mother mentions that, as Jane, she wanted to join the W.E.N.C.H.E.S., who catered to astronauts’ sexual needs. This side story is largely irrelevant to the main plot line, but it gives Heinlein a chance to stretch his political legs.

The acronym W.E.N.C.H.E.S. and its alternate version, W.H.O.R.E.S., are low-comedy verbal gags that treat several topics at once. First, they play a joke on the military’s penchant for initialized names of organizations and divisions. Second, they suggest what really goes on, behind the scenes, in the lives of space heroes. Third, they propose that a line of work long associated with fallen women might re-invent itself as a high-paying, respectable vocation. (This speaks to Heinlein’s interest in liberating sex from its social straitjacket.) Finally, it suggests that smart, capable women often have found themselves stuck in career cul-de-sacs where high-paying jobs remain closed off to them, forcing them to look elsewhere for ways to cover the rent.

The W.E.N.C.H.E.S. digression points to the struggle women face when juggling career and child-rearing: When Jane becomes pregnant, she loses the chance to join W.E.N.C.H.E.S. Further complicating Jane’s life is the sex-reassignment surgery that follows delivery of her baby. Jane doesn’t set out to live as a man but falls into it; though he learns to enjoy being male, he misses being female. His subsequent attempts to earn enough to survive suffer because social gender roles require him to work at jobs reserved for men, but he learned no such skills while growing up as a girl. He discovers writing as a profitable solution to his unique financial quandary.

Perhaps because Heinlein wrote “All You Zombies—” at the tail-end of his juvenile book phase, the short story contains a classic trope of young people’s books: the ugly duckling who becomes a swan. Jane is the duckling. After her/his sex change, Jane struggles in limbo for many years; when, finally, his older self talks him into joining the Temporal Bureau, he matures into a world-saving hero.

As both a female and a male, The Unmarried Mother understands both sides of the human gender equation and knows how to live either way. Heinlein hints that gender is less important than character, and that what matters aren’t the sex organs we have but the heart that inspires us to greatness.

The title includes quotation marks as a deliberate reference to something the narrator says at the end of the story. Out of nowhere, the quote connects the plot to zombies; already reeling from multiple mind-bending ideas, the story presents one last concept on which to chew.

A zombie is a body resurrected from death; the narrator’s zombies are his former selves, now gone yet brought back to life when he travels into the past to visit them. At the end of the tale, the narrator gazes down at the scar on his stomach from a Caesarean section, and he understands that he knows where he began—inside the body of himself when he was pregnant. He then asks, “where did All You Zombies come from?” (14) As a time agent, he’s addressing his earlier selves: little orphan Jane, pregnant Jane, the baby, and the Unmarried Mother. His time-travel visits to each of his selves confer on them a sense of separate identities. In a way, he has evoked them—brought them back to life—through his actions. For all he has learned and done, though, he misses simply being the young, innocent Jane.