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Study 104 - “ALL YOU ZOMBIES—” (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-29 01:02:58
Imported:
2024-08
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We're learning a new theory of relativity from the sci-fi classic “ALL YOU ZOMBIES—” by Robert A. Heinlein!

Special thanks to reader Levi Nunez of Loot the Body! Grab his add-on soundtrack for the Caverns of Thracia Legendary Adventure DCC!

Coming this Saturday: an extra credit episode on THE FINAL MANIMAL!

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Comments

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

Still mid-episode, but chiming in. I'm not intersex so I can't speak from firsthand experience, but from what I've heard from intersex folk, the non-consensual surgery and medical professionals/family choosing their gender for them is still very much a problem. As per the instance in this story, it feels uncomfortably realistic. The history of medicine is a history of sociopaths refusing to see you as a human being if you don't fit narrow parameters for what "normal" is in their eyes and believing their opinions on your treatment override your own agency. The doc and surgeon deciding to give Unmarried a hysterectomy without them even being *conscious* is the most realistic element of the tale to me.

KateSherrod

Superior execution of this idea can be found in David Gerrold's THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF. It's pretty great. A sort of slant rhyme to it is Breakfast in the Ruins by Michael Moorcock. Both of these authors are still alive so I'm hoping I haven't cursed them by mentioning them here! Also, in real 1970, doctors were doing all kinds of non-consensual things during caesarians. My own dear personal mom woke up from having me minus an appendix, just because the doctor got bored!

Ben Gilbert

I liked By His Bootstraps more than this story.

Beanz

I have so many questions and comments but to start, thank you for covering this.

Matthew Henry

There's a great audio play of "By His Bootstraps" featuring Richard Dreyfuss. You can find it on YouTube or RadioEchos. 50m long. I heard it when I was a kid and it still holds up.

Bugberry

I was honestly surprised to hear neither of you were familiar with Heinlein. An interpretation of the Zombies I've seen, which relates to the mention of "voices", has to do with the narrator seeing his other selves playing out actions he'd already experienced, seeing them as "zombies" mindlessly following a script, yet he knows they are him. It's kind of a comment on the question of does free will exist.

Bugberry

My first exposure to the Bootstrap Paradox was oddly from one of the Timesplitters first person shooter games. There's a level where the main character can't get past a door, then another one of him passes by a grating in the ceiling and drops a key that lets them through the door. Awhile later they do some time travel and end up at that same point and pass the key on to their past self.

Allison Albright

I think the most interesting thing about this story is how much an artifact of the time it was written it is. It just seems like all these ideas that are now considered sort of barbaric (the doctor making a life altering decision for the patient while the patient is unconscious, the only use for women in space is sex work, if you can't have another baby you might as well not be a woman, etc.) seem like they're treated as kind of a given in this story. It reminds me of the Poe story the Premature Burial where the scary part is supposed to be the getting buried alive stuff and (to me at least) the scary stuff in that story is instead all the 19th century medical procedures it describes.

Cayle Anderson

Doctor Who does a fantastic explanation of the Bootstrap Paradox complete with the 12th Doctor playing Beethoven's 5th on electric guitar.

ESTY

I agree with both Chris and Chad that it was a compelling concept, but for such an acclaimed author it felt like it was pretty awkwardly written. Futurama did it better. Does the character eat their own tail though? On one hand, they’re kinda making their own (incestuous) community out of nothing. But on the other hand; they are going to really great lengths to give themselves a lot of unresolvable trauma. It seems like a staffing/ payroll nightmare for the Time Agency.

The Spider Incident

I'm sorry to say, most intersex children do still have their sex decided by doctors and/or parents when they are born, and are treated with a combination of surgery and hormones starting from infancy. There are only a handful of countries that ban non-consensual sex assignment procedures. There are some trans people who are very close to me, and I was a bit on edge the entire time I was listening to your recap of the story. Knowing when it was written, I was bracing myself the whole time for what today would be very problematic ways of describing transgender people. (Thankfully, it was not as bad as it could have been.) On a less serious note, there's a Woody Guthrie tune that goes "All you fascists 'bound to lose," and as soon as I saw the title of this story, it started going through my head as "aaaaalll you zombies 'bound to loooooose!"

Richard Horsman

The thing about this story that sets it apart from the rest of Heinlein for me is the tone. His “as you know Bob”-ness is there the whole time, but there’s something feverish and weird underneath. I wish he’d gone there more, but I’ve read a lot of his stuff from before and after this, and “All You Zombies” still feels like an anomaly to me. Even his odd (and kinda gross) later books like Time Enough for Love don’t get there. All this to say that the story hits different when you’ve gotten accustomed to his usual. Sort of like when Chubby Checker did a psychedelic LP between endless singles about the twist.

Richard Horsman

Chad, the reason this story was giving you fits is that Heinlein is ALMOST a good writer, but he never quite hits. For my money this is as close as he got. His other big things like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, the Lazarus Long stuff, and on and on…It all always smacks of a guy who thinks his audience is too dumb to get his brilliant points, and it always puts my teeth on edge. I find Asimov’s similar tendencies less annoying, because it feels like Asimov was aware of and working with his own limitations as a writer, not the perceived limitations of his audience.

Jim Cannon

"Sexy Flash Gordon" - is there any other kind?

Jim Cannon

Somewhat disappointed this story wasn't based on that song by The Hooters.

Jim Cannon

I read a bit of Heinlein as a teen, and while he didn't do as much damage as, say, Piers Anthony, damage was done. I imagine kids these days get much the same experience from The Internet, but with pictures. Bob always had interesting sci-fi ideas, but all the weird sex stuff (and sexism, and rampant libertarianism) really eclipsed the good ideas. Even here, in a solid time-loop story, there's weird self-cest. Its like he can't help it.

It's a Ghost.

I used to wonder how someone could be in favor of performing gender defining surgery on intersex infants but be opposed to gender affirming surgery for transgender adults. It seemed like a contradiction. But now it seems clear to me that it’s simply about conformity. The intersex infant must have surgery to conform and the transgender adult can’t have surgery because they have to conform to the gender society or tradition has decided for them.

Alan Ricks

For anyone unsure about doctors actually choosing what sex to make you without your consent… read about the heartbreaking story of David Reimer. Heinlein, the arch-libertarian, whose ideas about gender roles and racial hierarchies cause me to seethe as an adult did admittedly have a formative roll in the development of my nerdom during my childhood. I cannot deny that. But not his hyper-capitalist utopias or colonialist dystopias. It was one of his space juvenile books, “Space Cadet”. I was 9 or 10 and my exposure to sci-fi had been the warp/hyperspace travel (bordering on fantasy) in Star Trek/Wars and reading Space Cadet where rockets have to have enough fuel to meet certain trajectories and space travel is very slow and empty really intrigued me. The cover alone, with the massive rocket about to blast off in stark relief still gets me. It inspired the rest of the “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” series but none of those ever moved me like the original.

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

As a coda to my comment on Study 101 about Robert Barbour Johnson being heavily influenced by Charles Fort, I just wanted to note that all three of the other writers you picked this month - Dick, Hamilton, and Heinlein - were also Forteans. Buhs mentions Hamilton and Heinlein (along with Johnson) in his book Think to New Worlds (2024) and all three are discussed at length in Tanner F. Boyle's related volume The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction (2021).

REO Jackwagon

You guys could never cover them but if there's any room in your reading list, I can't recommend Charles Stross' The Laundry Files enough.

Steve

I've read a lot of Heinlein, from an early age, and progressively went off him as he became increasingly sexist (spung!, need I say more). You mentioned his early left wing years, but his wife was much more right wing, and Bob's politics shifted over the older he got (q.v. Starship Troopers).

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

I was once caught in a time loop in which I was rushing to the emergency veterinarian to meet up with my wife, who had taken our dog there following a road accident in which the dog was struck by a car and lost a leg. In my haste, I ran over a dog, causing it to lose a leg, and it was ours! I would give you more details but there is actually too much pathos. There must be a story that strikes a balance between mine and the complete lack of pathos in Heinlein’s.

Steve

There's also the creepy Door into Summer in which SPOILERS a man uses time travel to marry a 12 year old child when she gets older.

Jerome Tracy

I found it interesting that in Phillip K. Dick's introduction to the paperback collection of his short stories called "The Golden Man," he spoke of Heinlein. To paraphrase, he said that at one point when he was down on his luck, Heinlein gave him help, even though he knew the two of them couldn't be farther apart, politically. Maybe we could recognize the differences in people's beliefs without demonizing them for them?

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

As soon as your time travel story allows for paradox, you need to toss out any notion of "original". In this case, where did the DNA come from? It has always been and will always be. There is no free will. Things must play out exactly as they did, are, and will. Most folks hate this. Time travel doesn't get much better if paradoxes cannot exist. Because now there is no such thing as "the" timeline. Time travelers are not making alterations to what is proper, they're just doing stuff and as a result either 1) creating a new time line branching off from the other, or 2) altering all the events that come later save for those required to avoid paradox. There's no correct timeline to protect. Very little has to play out. Everything you think is true about you could be overwritten at any time and probably has been. Most folks hate this, too. Time travel is a heck of a thing.

Thunk

A fine time to find Heinlein in the timeline.

Long time hater

Unwed Mother did indeed, to quote Philip J Fry 'do the Nastie in the Past-ie'. I wonder, if the time Paradox was in play, at what point in the time line the protagonist would have started to experience the fading away warning as in Back to the Future when Marty's mum starts to fall for him; or whether this is a closed loop where the peril is ever present and there was no way to break the cycle. On a side note, isn't strange that super creepy Crispin Glover was in a film where someone travels back in time and seduces their own mother and Crispin Glover ISN'T that guy? Talk about paradoxes...

JonEsprockets

Note that women were still being sterilized without their consent in the 50s and homosexuals were being chemically castrated. It’s not too far fetched that doctors would do such things. Many of Heinlein’s books explore gender and sexuality.

Anne Ominous

Reading this I went from 'oh cool! Hard boiled!' to 'wait...what?' to 'ohmygoshnoway!' Politics and personality aside, it was great fun. My first Heinlein I think...

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

The Beethoven time-travel paradox made me think (mainly because the Bell Riots have been all over the internet during the past few days) of Sisko and Gabriel Bell from the Trek DS9 story "Past Tense." There's not quite a bootstrap paradox in that one, but still there's the idea of a time traveler having to play out a seemingly predestined role in order to preserve the timeline.

BeetleBro

The Twilight Zone episode "The Once and Future King" follows the same Beethoven paradox idea but with an Elvis impersonator accidentally killing Elvis. That episode has floated in the back of brain for years for some reason lol

Psuke Bariah

As I recall, the punks weren't wearing swastikas ironically. Malcolm McLaren may have put members of the band in nazi t-shirts as a fashion statement, but the Nazi-sympathetic British skinheads were an issue in the early 80's. It was less of a problem among American punks, where the spirit was more anarchistic, but there were still a few.

Anne Ominous

75 comments on this show! More than any given weird bear interlude - which after reading this story, seem quant and huggable.