| " '—All You Zombies—' " | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Robert A. Heinlein | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publication | |
| Published in | The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction |
| Publication date | 1959 |
" '—All You Zombies—' "[a] is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was written in one day, July 11, 1958, and first published in the March 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 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.[1]
"'—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.
The unusual title of the story, which includes both the quotation marks and dashes shown above,[2] is a quotation from a sentence near the end of the story; the quotation is taken from the middle of the sentence, hence the dashes indicating elided text before and after the title.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).