Time travel paradoxes are a recurring device in
science fiction. In such stories, characters can
meet themselves in time or inadvertently change
the course of history in such a way that their trip
back to their original time is impossible. Robert A.
HEINLEIN’s “All You Zombies” was so much more
complex and cleverly done than its predecessors
that it immediately became the benchmark
against which all similar stories had to be measured, supplanting his own previous story, “BY HIS
BOOTSTRAPS.” It remained unrivaled of its type
until 1973, when David GERROLD’s The Man Who
“All You Zombies”
Folded Himself appeared—but Gerrold needed an
entire novel to outdo the Heinlein story, and the
more compact short remains the ultimate time
travel story.
The setting is an unspecified future where
space travel is a fact of life and attitudes toward
sex and prostitution are very different from what
they are today. The protagonist is a member of an
unspecified group of time policemen who is masquerading as a bartender in order to recruit a man
who writes sob stories for the romance magazines.
The customer, a man, regales the bartender with
the story of his life, asserting that he was a girl during his childhood, orphaned, later left pregnant by
a mysterious man who disappeared from her life.
Shortly after giving birth to her daughter, she
learned from her doctor that she was actually
hermaphroditic and that complications during the
birth procedure made it necessary to remove her
female organs, leaving her effectively male. As if
that was not enough of a blow, an unknown man
kidnapped the infant and disappeared.
Once Heinlein establishes the setting, the
twists and turns come quickly. The bartender takes
the writer back through time and sets him on the
trail of his mysterious despoiler. Once the writer is
out of the way, the bartender visits the hospital to
steal the newborn child of his companion’s earlier
self, then travels even further back in time and
drops her at an orphanage. We learn that the
writer is actually his own mother. But Heinlein
does not stop there: The time traveler jumps
through time again and finds the writer in the process of seducing his younger, female self, which
means that he is also his own father. And for good
measure, the story closes with the revelation that
the time traveler is a much older version of the
same three-part character. Although the prose is
occasionally stiff and clumsy, the plot twists are
quick and clever. The story remains one of the enduring classics of the genre.