Required Reading: All You Zombies
Every so often, I run across little snippets of things I find fascinating and would like to share. There are a few short stories I've read that have been particularly thought-provoking or otherwise noteworthy, and so I'm going to try to point them out periodically. I'm brazenly calling this segment "Required Reading" for lack of a better term and in hopes I can someday hand out quizzes to my readers. Literature is probably the weakest link in my chain of media appreciation, but I'll start with the gems of my meager collection and work my way out.
This particular story is an old piece by Robert A. Heinlein, pictured at right. The proper name for the story is "—All You Zombies—", quotations included, and is misleadingly (disappointingly?) not about zombies at all. It is instead about time travel, and is still considered to be one of the ultimate stories in the genre.
Heinlein wrote "—All You Zombies—" in a single day in 1958 and had it published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine the following year. On the simplest level, it is a story of a time travelling operative who goes back in time to recruit a young writer into his bureau. It quickly gets much, much more complicated, and it will probably take multiple readings to fully make sense. This is essentially the mother of all time travel paradoxes, so prepare to be overwhelmed. It's about ten pages long though, so you don't have to stick it out for very long.
Continue reading to (hopefully) see the story embedded from Google Books. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you should be able to read it here.