![]() The baby was kidnapped by a mysterious older gentleman, and not seen again. Complications during delivery, by Caesarean section, rendered the female organs unviable and the physicians gave her a gender reassignment. During the delivery of her child, doctors discovered she was intersex, with internalized male sex organs as well as female sex organs. While a fairly ugly teenager in 1963, she was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by an older man. The young man is called the Unmarried Mother, because he writes stories for confession magazines, many of them presumably from the point of view of an unmarried mother.Ĭajoled by the Bartender, the Unmarried Mother explains why he understands the female viewpoint so well: he was born a girl, in 1945, and raised in an orphanage. The Bartender remarks that no one in his family ever gets married, including him. The two of them relate in that both of them are from unmarried parents. It begins with a young man speaking to the narrator, the Bartender, in 1970. The story involves an intricate series of time-travel journeys (see diagram). Narrative order of events Timeline of "'-All You Zombies- '" in diagrammatic form As the story unfolds, all the major characters are revealed to be the same person, at different stages of their life. "'-All You Zombies- '" chronicles a young man (later revealed to be intersex) taken back in time and tricked into impregnating his younger, female self (before he was forced to undergo sexual reassignment surgery) he turns out to be the offspring of that union, with the paradoxical result that he is his own mother and father. The unusual title of the story, which includes both the quotation marks and dashes shown above, 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. 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. "'-All You Zombies- '" further develops themes explored by the author in a previous work: " By His Bootstraps", published some 18 years earlier. In 1980, it was nominated for the Balrog Award for short fiction. The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel. 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. " '-All You Zombies-' " is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction For the song by The Hooters, see All You Zombies (song). This article is about the short story by Robert A.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |