—All You Zombies—

Robert A. Heinlein

3 ideas

1. The Unmarried Mother Who Is Everyone

   In 1970 a bartender who is a Temporal Bureau agent listens to a young writer called 'the Unmarried Mother' explain how, raised as Jane in a 1945 orphanage, she was seduced and abandoned by a stranger, gave birth, was found to be intersex, and was surgically turned into a man, while her baby daughter was stolen from the nursery. The bartender takes him back to 1963, where he seduces young Jane and so becomes the father, then carries the baby back to 1945 to leave her at the orphanage and recruits the man into the Bureau. The bartender is the same person grown older, so one individual is mother, father, child, seducer, kidnapper and recruiter, with no outside origin.

2. Fixed Past Turns Free Will Into Fulfilment

   When the past cannot be changed, a time traveller's actions can only complete what has already happened. They cannot alter it. The characters act with apparent free choice and strong emotion, such as rage at the seducer or grief for the stolen child, yet each choice is exactly what creates the injury being grieved. Agency is experienced from inside the loop even though the outcome was fixed from outside.

3. The Narrator's Loneliness Inside the Loop

   Near the end the agent asks, 'I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?', and alone in the dark he doubts that anyone but himself is really there. He also says he misses someone dreadfully. The story attaches this loneliness and doubt to his self-contained origin, but it does not show that the other people are unreal.

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