Summary Of Robert Heinlein's 'All You Zombies'

Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” revolves around the aspect of time travel. An author tells a tale of his life to a bartender and together, they go back in time in hopes of “fixing” the writer’s past. The story reveals an unexpected and mind-boggling conclusion and we learn that it is full of paradoxes due to multiple time travelling.

The first scene takes place in New York, November 1970. The story starts off with an author, who is referred to as “the unmarried mother”, telling a bartender a tale of his life. The bartender is amazed that the author had managed to write so well in the perspective of a woman and the author revealed that he was indeed born a female, Jane. The unmarried mother was an illegitimate child who was found at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. When she was in her late

Temporal paradox refers to the “causal loop that arises when a future event is the cause of a past event, which in turn is the cause of the future event” [1]. For example, one of the future events where the Unmarried Mother seduced and impregnated Jane had caused Jane to be pregnant in the past and this in turn causes a series of events in the future as Jane grows older and eventually went through a “sex change”. As the story develops, this same Jane / Unmarried Mother seduces and impregnates a girl who so happened to be Jane. Thus, this causes a loop whereby Jane’s past, present and future self coexists in the same time period. It is also difficult to indicate the origin of the series of events in Jane’s life, similar to the question, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The sentence “the snake that eats its own tail, forever and ever” is used to emphasize the time travel paradox. The snake is used as a symbol with regards to Jane as the snake’s actions, eating its own tail, leads to the snake suffering from the consequence of his own actions much like what happens to Jane in this