All You Zombies

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1959

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The Paradox of Time Travel

The problem with time travel—apart from whether it’s possible at all—is that, if one goes into the past, actions there will alter the timeline so that, when one returns to one’s own time, things will have changed. “All You Zombies—” is essentially a thought problem that asks, “Would it be possible, through time travel, to become one’s own parent?”

The story manages to prove that such a scenario might, indeed, be possible. It’s only doable, however, if the protagonist travels back in time to arrange things to make them possible. The narrator, a time traveler for the futuristic Temporal Bureau, travels from 1993 to 1970, where he meets himself from that year and takes himself back to 1963. In 1963, he impregnates his earlier, female self, then time-travels to 1964, where he kidnaps his female self’s baby and takes it to a 1945 orphanage, where it will grow up to become his own female self who gets impregnated by his later, male self, and, even later, become the time agent who engineers the entire sequence of events.

The implication is that, somehow, the time agent created himself through his time-traveling actions. Would he have existed at all, had he not gone back in time to impregnate his earlier self and, later, kidnapped his infant self and placed it in the orphanage where he grows up as a girl? The story’s endless logical curlicue boggles the mind. How could the narrator even have existed before he becomes a time agent? The possibilities curve back on themselves until, like feedback between a microphone and a speaker, they begin to scream.

The central point of the story, then, is that time travel creates logic puzzles that may be impossible to resolve but just might be possible. The story’s plot exists as an eddy in the stream of time, perpetually cycling back on itself, both to create itself and to protect that creation.

The Plasticity of Sex

At the orphanage, young Jane grows up lonely, unattractive, and frustrated. She doesn’t yet know that she’s a hermaphrodite, a person with both sets of sex organs. When, later, she gives birth, the doctors discover her condition and that her female organs have been severely damaged; Jane leaves the maternity ward as a male. This unusual experience gives the reader an interesting perspective on sex reassignment surgery and how it feels to transition from one sex to another other.

As a girl, Jane struggles with her identity. It’s not that she wishes she were a man, but that she yearns for the opportunities available to men in the early 1960s. Jane’s frustrated wish to find a well-paying career evolves into a desire to serve as a highly paid companion for sex-starved astronauts. Her pregnancy and sex reassignment interrupt those plans, and Jane struggles to make a living as a man with a woman’s skill training.

Jane grows accustomed to being a male, finds himself attracted to women, and discovers a career in writing that skirts his era’s socially defined limits on men’s and women’s work roles. Still, he’s bitter because he doesn’t understand why he had to suffer the ordeal with his sex organs. He has found that being a male or female doesn’t really matter in itself; what counts is having opportunities and being at home with oneself as a person.

Once he learns what has really happened to him—once he understands his uniquely astonishing personal history—he finds peace in his work as a time agent. Still, he misses dreadfully being the young woman Jane. This isn’t so much because he misses being female; rather, it’s that he misses her innocence. Despite her troubles growing up, at least she knew who she was. At least, she thought she knew.

The Love and Forgiveness of Oneself

Beyond its intriguing and multifaceted main character and its “Life is tough, get a helmet” tone, “All You Zombies—” is a science-fiction classic because it packs three enormous ideas into one short story. The time-travel paradox leaves readers’ heads spinning; the concept of sex reassignment takes on new meaning as the reader realizes how challenging and disorienting a change from one gender to another might be. A third concept emerges as well from the story, that of learning to forgive and love oneself despite the problems and failures of the past.

The Unmarried Mother seethes with resentment about his life. His parents abandoned him; he’s angry with the man who seduced him when he was a woman; he’s angry with himself for falling for that man. His sex reassignment surgery hurled him into a new set of socio-economic hardships, and, though he found his way forward, he’s embittered still by the difficulties imposed on him due to the arbitrary sexual norms of society.

When the bartender takes him back in time to the moment of his seduction, he realizes it was he who was the seducer as well as the victim. When he learns it also was he who traveled back in time to kidnap Jane’s baby, and that he was absconding with his own infant self, he realizes that half of his problems stem from his own decisions. And when, at last, he sees that he performed those actions to save his own life from temporal oblivion, he finds a new opportunity: to forgive himself. More than that, he can put all the pieces of his life into a perspective that permits him, once again, to love and admire himself.

The author does something daring, especially for a 1959 audience: He suggests, through the Unmarried Mother’s seduction of his earlier female self, that it’s possible not only to love oneself but to be—dare it be said?—sexually attracted to oneself.

This might at first appear gratuitous, but the story’s time paradox requires that it happen. Though many readers likely squirm with discomfort over the idea, the goal isn’t to be garish but instead to open readers’ minds and hearts to the possibility of profound self-love. “It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself” (12). The seduction suggests the possibility of a full reconciliation between the male and female aspects of each of us.

In this strange and surprising way, Jane and the Unmarried Mother reconcile and reunite. They have achieved a unique feat: In the process of coupling, they also, quite literally, create themselves. In understanding this and seeing their life history in a new light, the protagonist embraces all their many-sided personhood, fully loving and appreciating all their selves for the first time.