All You Zombies

" '—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.

"'—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 (1985), including the Circle of Ouroboros and the Temporal Corps.

"'—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 sexual reassignment surgery); 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 two of them relate in that both of them are from unmarried parents. The Bartender remarks that no one in his family ever gets married, including him. He wears an Ourobouros ring. 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.

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