All You Zombies

The bartender, who awaits the arrival of a young man he intends to recruit into the time-traveling Temporal Bureau, tells the story. The bartender is the oldest version of the other main characters in the story, but only he knows this at the outset. The bartender’s need is to get his younger self to join the Bureau and thereby complete the cycle of time he is manipulating. He is worldly wise, mildly cynical yet compassionate, and thoughtful about his encounters with his past selves, whom he treats as separate persons.

Jane is the first version of the story’s hero. Kidnapped as an infant from her single parent, Jane grows up in an orphanage where she struggles with several issues, including having no family, being unattractive, and becoming a target for older students’ sexual predations. Her biggest desire is to have a good job, but finding one is difficult because she’s a woman in a man’s world, and few men will marry her because they consider her unattractive. Jane’s brief affair with a nice young man results in a late-teen pregnancy that runs into complications requiring sex reassignment surgery. Her female organs “could never be any use to you again, so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man” (7). Her emergence as a male creates financial and social dilemmas that Jane finally solves by becoming an advice columnist for women known as the Unmarried Mother. 

The Unmarried Mother is a young man who writes an advice column from the perspective of a woman; this angle works because the young man once was a woman—technically, a hermaphrodite who, during the birth of her daughter, received sex reassignment surgery. Embittered by the way his life turned out—his sudden sex change hurled him into financial difficulties; his baby was kidnapped—the Unmarried Mother is ready for a new direction when the bartender at Pop’s Place approaches him about joining the Temporal Bureau. To his stunned astonishment, he learns from traveling back in time that it was he who seduced his younger, female self and impregnated her, and that the baby would turn out to be himself. He finally realizes that he is the bartender come back to recruit him. All of this creates a huge identity crisis, which he resolves by becoming the time traveler who engineers his own history so that it doesn’t collapse.