Imagine for a second that you walk into a bookstore.
You pick up a copy of, say, Hamlet. Okay. You
travel back in time to Elizabethan England to
find Shakespeare, and you just hand him the book.
He copies it out word for word and publishes
it. Right. The question is... Yeah. Who actually
wrote Hamlet? It has no origin. It just exists
in a loop. And that is, I mean, that's the classic
definition of the bootstrap paradox. A causal
loop. Exactly. It's where an object or, you know,
a piece of information, in this case, the play,
has no discernible beginning. It just defies
the standard law of cause and effect because
the effect is the cause. And today we're not
just talking about some theoretical paradox.
We're looking at the story that arguably perfected
this very concept. Absolutely. You're doing a
deep dive into Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 short
story. All you zombies. It's widely considered
the ultimate time travel story. And not because
it's, you know, some epic adventure with dinosaurs
or lasers. No. But because it is this incredibly
tight, almost claustrophobic examination of a
single timeline just folding in on itself. And
when we say folding, I mean, it literally ties
itself into a knot. This is a story where a character
isn't just changing their own history. It's a
narrative feat that Heinlein apparently wrote
in a single day. Which is just staggering when
you think about the complexity of the plot. He
wrote it, sent it off, and it was promptly rejected
by Playboy. Well, to be fair, Playboy in the
late 50s did publish some great fiction. They
did. But this story was probably a little too
weird, even for them. It deals with gender reassignment.
intersex physiology, and a level of incest that,
frankly, you need a flowchart to understand.
So it eventually landed in the magazine of fantasy
and science fiction in 1959. And thank goodness
it did. Because it became this touchstone for
scientists and philosophers. I mean, you've got
Carl Sagan, David Lewis, Dana CLM. They all reference
this specific 15 -page story when they talk about
the mechanics of time. So our mission today is
to try and figure out why. We are going to trace
the timeline. of a person who is their own mother
and their own father. And we're going to look
at the philosophical nightmare that's just hidden
right there in the title. It's a story about
identity, loneliness, and the terrifying possibility
that we're all just, you know, waiting for a
bus in someone else's universe. Let's do it.
Okay, let's step into the scene. It's November
7th, 1970. We're in a dive bar in New York City.
The atmosphere is quiet, smoky, probably smells
like stale beer and regret. And behind the counter,
we have our narrator, the bartender. He's this
older guy, cynical, keeps to himself. And he
drops this odd little detail early on. What's
that? That no one in his family ever gets married.
Which sounds like just a throwaway line, right?
Like he's just a bachelor. But in this story,
every single detail is a load -bearing wall.
And he's wearing a ring. The Ouroboros. The ancient
symbol of the snake eating its own tail. You
see it in Egyptian iconography, Greek magic.
It always represents infinity or the cycle of
life and death. Or in this case, a very, very
closed loop. And into this bar walks the customer.
A young man, barely 25. He orders a drink and
the bartender notices he has this. This air of
profound bitterness about him. But the most interesting
thing about him is the name he writes under.
He introduces himself as the unmarried mother.
It's quite the pseudonym. It is. The bartender
asks about it, and the young man explains he
writes for confession magazines. We should probably
explain what those were. Yeah, for anyone younger
listening, in the mid -20th century, before,
you know, Reddit threads or reality TV, we had
these confession magazines. And they were huge.
Titles like True Romance or True Confessions.
They published these dramatic first -person accounts
of scandal, usually focused on women who had,
quote, fallen from grace, unwed pregnancies,
illicit affairs, that kind of thing. Right. They
were sensationalist, a little moralizing, but
incredibly popular. And this character, the unmarried
mother, explains he writes these stories from
the female perspective. He claims to know exactly
how an unmarried woman feels when she's been
seduced and abandoned. He says it with such conviction
that the bartender kind of calls him on it. He
does. He puts a bottle of liquor on the bar.
He calls it the bet and says, if your story is
better than my liquor, I'll give you the bottle.
And so the young man begins. This is where the
flashback starts. The tragic history of a person
named Jane. And this is where the story shifts
from just a barroom chat to a real tragedy. The
character reveals that he wasn't born male. No.
He was born a female infant and abandoned at
an orphanage in 1945. Jane's life is just defined
by isolation. She grows up in this orphanage
feeling fundamentally different from the other
girls. She even says she feels like a horse in
a flock of sheep. She tries to find a place to
belong. She even attempts to join this strict
military -style comfort corps to support space
travelers. But she gets rejected for reasons
she doesn't really understand. It's just one
rejection after another. Until 1963. Jane is
18 years old. She's working menial jobs. She's
lonely. Just drifting. And then... She meets
a man. A mysterious older man. It's a whirlwind
romance. For the first time, Jane feels... seen.
She falls completely in love, she is seduced,
and almost immediately she becomes pregnant.
And just as quickly as he arrived, the man vanishes.
He's gone. He leaves her pregnant and destitute.
It's the classic Confession magazine setup, right?
The girl left holding the baby. But the real
twist, the big one, comes at the hospital. Jane
goes into labor and it is catastrophic. The doctors
have to perform an emergency C -section. And
while she's under anesthesia, the surgeons discover
that Jane is intersex. Now, Heinlein was writing
this in 1958. So the medical terminology and
understanding were different. Very different.
But the premise is that Jane had both internal
male and female reproductive organs. And the
doctors determined that the birth complications
have completely ruined the female organs. They're
beyond repair. So without Jane's consent, which.
really reflects the you know terrifying medical
paternalism of the era oh yeah the doctors perform
gender reassignment surgery They save the male
organs, which were immature but intact, and they
reconstruct Jane physically as a male. Can you
just imagine waking up from that? No. You've
lost your lover. You've just had this traumatic
birth. And the doctor walks in and tells you
that you are no longer a woman. You are now physically
and legally a man. It just destroys Jane's identity.
But the final blow hasn't even landed yet. Right.
While Jane, who is now him, is recovering, someone
sneaks into the nursery and kidnaps the baby
girl. The baby is gone. Without a trace. So this
character has lost everything. His history as
a woman, his future as a mother, and the one
child that was his only connection to the world.
And that is how Jane becomes the unmarried mother.
He has to learn to live as a man in the 1960s,
learns to type, takes up writing these tawdry
stories because it's the only way he can, well,
monetize his pain. And that path leads him, seven
years later, right into that bar in 1970. It
is a devastating backstory. It is. When he finishes
telling it, the mood in the bar is heavy. But
the bartender. He isn't just a sympathetic ear.
This is where the trap snaps shut. The bartender
leans in and he makes this offer. He says, I
know where the man is who did this to you. The
man who seduced you and ruined your life. If
I take you to him, will you kill him? And the
unmarried mother doesn't even hesitate. He is
so full of rage, he just says yes. So the bartender
leads him into the back room. But instead of
a street exit, there's a machine. A time machine.
The bartender reveals he's a temporal agent,
a member of a bureau that polices history. They
step into the machine and they jump. Back to
April 3, 1963. The specific date Jane met her
seducer. The bartender hands the unmarried mother
a weapon and drops him off in a park, tells him
to find the man, and then the bartender just
leaves him there. Okay, and we have to track
the bartender's movements very carefully here.
Right. He leaves the unmarried mother in 1963,
but he doesn't go back to 1970 yet. He jumps
forward 11 months to March 1964. To the hospital
the night the baby was kidnapped. Exactly. The
bartender enters the nursery, takes the baby
girl Jane's baby, and jumps back in time again,
all the way back to 1945. And he leaves the baby
on the steps of an orphanage. And this is the
first huge realization you have to grapple with
as a reader. The baby dropped at the orphanage
in 1945 grows up to be Jane. Which means Jane
gave birth to herself. Correct. The baby is Jane.
Jane is the mother and the baby is the daughter.
They are the exact same person. But that's only
half of the loop. Not even. So let's go back
to the park in 1963. The unmarried mother is
wandering around looking for this man who seduced
Jane. He's looking for a villain. He's looking
for someone to hate. But as he's waiting in the
shadows, he sees a young girl sitting on a bench.
It's Jane, his younger female self. And he doesn't
just see her. He feels this. overwhelming instinctive
pull towards her, a sense of completeness he
has never felt before. It's basically narcissism
disguised as romance. He goes up to her. They
start talking. And because he is a man now and
older, Jane sees him as this mysterious, sophisticated
stranger she's been waiting for. And the realization
just hits the unmarried mother like a freight
train. He is the seducer. He is the man Jane
fell in love with. The mechanics of it are just
brutal. He seduces his younger self. He impregnates
her. He ensures that the baby, who is also himself,
is created. So he is his own father. And his
own mother. And his own child. The whole family
tree. The bartender returns to pick him up right
after the act is done, completing the tragedy.
The unmarried mother is in total shock. Understandably.
But the bartender whisks him away to 1985. Drops
him on at the headquarters of the temporal bureau.
And the unmarried mother, now seeing the true
shape of his own reality, gets recruited into
the agency. He spends the next few decades working
as a time agent, aging, getting cynical. Until
he gets one last assignment. To go undercover
as a bartender in New York, 1970. To meet his
younger self. To hear the story and to start
the whole cycle all over again. The bartender
is the unmarried mother. Just older. It is a
perfect closed circle. The baby, Jane, the unmarried
mother, the bartender, all the same person at
different points on the same timeline. This is
where a philosopher like David Lewis gets really
excited. He argued this story is the only way
time travel actually makes sense. Right. Because
usually we worry about the grandfather paradox.
If I go back and kill my grandfather, I'm never
born, so I can't go back and kill him. It's a
contradiction. But in all you zombies, the time
travel doesn't change the past. It creates the
past. Yes. The unmarried mother has to go back
to 1963 to impregnate Jane or else he is never
born. The effect, his birth necessitates the
cause, the time travel. It's logically consistent,
even if it's biologically impossible. It's the
Ouroboros. The snake isn't destroying itself,
it's feeding itself. Exactly. Stanislaw Lem called
it the minimal possible bootstrap paradox. It's
an elegant, self -sustaining system. But while
the logic is clean, the emotional implication
is horrific. That brings us to the title. The
story ends with the bartender closing up shop
in 1970, and then he jumps forward to his retirement
date. He's totally alone. He looks at his C -section
scar. The mark of his beginning and his end.
And he has this moment of supreme existential
crisis. He knows exactly where he came from.
He fathered himself. He bore himself. He recruited
himself. He's the entire family tree in one body.
He is a universe of one. And because he is so
sure of his own existence, he starts to doubt
the reality of everyone else. He thinks, and
I'm quoting here, I know where I came from, but
where did all you zombies come from? That is
the line that just haunts you, all you zombies.
He's looking at you, the listener, the normal
people with mothers and fathers, and he sees
us as the weird ones. It's solipsism in its most
extreme form. Solipsism is this philosophical
idea that the only mind you can be sure exists
is your own. But for the bartender, this isn't
a theory. It's his lived reality. He is a closed
loop. We are just linear accidents. To him, we're
background extras, zombies walking around to
make the world look populated while he plays
out his eternal drama. It totally flips the script
on loneliness. Usually we think of connection
as the default state. But he views his isolation
as the only true form of purity. It's terrifyingly
lonely, but it's also... incredibly arrogant.
It's a defense mechanism, I think. If you are
truly that alone, you have to believe you're
a god or else you would just go insane. We should
mention the film adaptation, Predestination.
Oh, we have to. Starring Ethan Hawke and Sarah
Snook. It came out in 2014. And it is a fantastic
film. It's remarkably faithful to the plot. It
is, but there's a bit of a tonal shift. The movie
tries to add this layer of romance, a sense that
the character truly loves themself in a way that
is almost tender. Whereas Heinlein's story feels...
Colder. More clinical. Yes. In the book, the
seduction isn't romance. It's a necessity. It's
almost mechanical. The movie softens the edges
of the narcissism a bit, but the book stares
right into that abyss. Sarah Snook's performance,
though. Incredible. She captures that gender
fluidity and the pain of the transformation so
well. Absolutely. And speaking of staring into
the abyss, there is one detail in the story that
I think just sums up the whole absurdity of the
situation. The jukebox. The jukebox. And the
song, I'm My Own Grandpa. Which is a real song.
It's a real song. It was a novelty hit in 1947
by Lonzo and Oscar. It's about a guy who marries
a widow with a grown daughter. And through this,
like, cascade of marriages, he ends up being
his own grandfather. And in the story, the bartender
yells at a customer for playing it. He screams,
turn that off. Because it's just too on the nose.
It's the universe mocking him. But then at the
very end of the story, after he secured the timeline
and ensured his own birth. He lets the song play.
He accepts it. He accepts that he is a paradox.
So what we have is a story about a man who is
his own mother, father, and child. A man who
recruits himself into a time policing agency
just to ensure he could do it all over again.
And it raises the question, is this freedom?
Or is this a prison? I think it's a prison. He
can never do anything else. He can never choose
a different path. If he decides not to travel
back to 1963, he just ceases to exist. He's a
slave to his own history. And yet he looks at
us, people with free will, people with, you know,
unknown futures, and calls us the zombies. Well,
maybe he's jealous. We have the luxury of not
knowing what happens next. He has to live the
same life loop after loop forever. That is a
heavy thought to leave you on. Robert Heinlein
wrote this in 1958, and we're still getting headaches
trying to figure it out today. That's the mark
of a truly great story, isn't it? It doesn't
just entertain you. It rewires your brain a little
bit. So next time you look in the mirror, just
be glad you have parents and that you aren't
your own grandpa. It certainly simplifies the
family reunions. If you haven't read All You
Zombies, please go find it. It's short, it's
punchy, and it is brilliant. Or watch Predestination.
Thanks for exploring The Loop with us today.
Until next time. See you in the future.