Robert Heinlein’s ‘All You Zombies—‘ on Escape Pod
Review by Cat Eldridge: In a scant fourteen minutes, Heinlein creates the most perfect time travel story of all time and lays the foundation for World as Myth novels that were written much later than this, which was written in Heinlein in 1958. He has been quoted as saying he wrote it in one day, not surprising given the speed with which the tale is told.
But first some words about narrators, audio quality and why older audio isn’t always better than newer audio. You can purchase this story as part of The Fantasies of Robert Heinlein which Tor Books did some fifteen years ago.
The collection is quite wonderful and well worth reading but the audiobook version of this collection is just plain awful — a tinny sound combined with a truly boring narrator who sounds like he’s sleepwalking through the fourteen minutes. Avoid at all costs. So what should you listen to instead? Well that’s where a neat podcast called EscapePod comes in.
Steve Eley narrates the story and does a superb job of doing so. There’s only two different voices needed for all practical purposes and he makes them sound like people you’d know from their voices if you met them. And the production is spot on.
Now about this story. Essentially it’s a tale of sexual genders switched (literally) over and over again. All of which are… Oh never mind. Look I can’t really tell you much about the tale as that’d spoil your enjoying this really clever tale in which not a word is wasted, not a story aspect is not wrapped up perfectly.
If you’ve read the later World as Myth novels such as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, you’ll see where Heinlein first thought of those ideas including the name of the time travelling force that’s central to the World as Myth novels. Indeed I suspect that this story was what led him to write those later, specifically Stranger in A Strange Land, The Number of The Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond The Sunset. To a lesser extent, these ideas show up elsewhere as well.
So go here for the location of this story and do check their other spoken story productions. You won’t be at all disappointed!
(EscapePod, July 2, 2009)
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It should perhaps be noted that Eley has since transitioned and is now Serah Eley.
I hadn’t thought of this story as a precursor to “World as Myth” (you can see precursors to that concept as early as “Beyond this Horizon,” though). AYZ is a great tale though – one of my favorites.
I had not thought of the World as Myth either. But this does make me wonder a bit again about Time Enough for Love.
The stories that this also makes me think of are The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag and They, which also are very proto The World as Myth works
@Paul: And in “Beyond this Horizon” Hamilton Felix gets knocked unconscious, and spends some time being confused about who he is, and imagining that the whole world is a game that he is playing against himself, with himself playing some of the parts, but others being NPCs.
I think it would be more accurate to recognize that solipsism was a lifelong interest of Heinlein and thus showed up often in his work, rather than suggest that “World as Myth” was a thing before Number of the Beast.