Short Story: All You Zombies—

Summary
A solitary bartender who works nights reveals himself to be a recruiter for a mysterious Temporal Bureau. He encounters a young, disoriented man in the bar and begins to probe that man's oddly fragmented life story: orphaned, raised in an institution, and desperate to find the parents he never knew. Through a series of conversations and time-travel missions the bartender pieces together the young man's origins and guides him into service with the Bureau, promising answers that the young man craves.
The narrative follows a woman called Jane who grows up without family, is seduced by a stranger and becomes pregnant, and then loses the child after birth. She undergoes an illegal sex-change operation and, under a new male identity, joins the Temporal Bureau. As the plot loops back on itself, the stranger, the child, the recruit, and the bartender are gradually revealed to be the same individual at different stages of life. The story culminates in a tightly closed causal loop: every major act of birth, abandonment, recruitment, and seduction is performed by the same person, who is simultaneously mother, father, child, and recruiter.

Themes and structure
The story is constructed as a puzzle built from time-travel paradoxes, its emotional force coming from the revelation that identity can fold back on itself. Heinlein explores the philosophical implications of predestination and the illusion of agency by showing how every choice is both cause and effect. The protagonist's literal self-parentage forces readers to confront unsettling questions about personhood, continuity, and the ethics of manipulating lives to preserve a timeline.
Gender and loneliness are central emotional threads. The protagonist's sex-change and subsequent isolation emphasize how identity can be both constructed and imposed, while the narrative's cyclical logic turns questions of responsibility inward: how does one relate to others when every relationship is ultimately a relation to oneself? Heinlein mixes a clipped, almost clinical telling with emotional undertows, using the conventions of detective storytelling and hard science fiction to stage a human drama that is also an intellectual trick.

Legacy and impact
The story remains one of Heinlein's most discussed novellas because it condenses a powerful paradox into a compact, memorable tale that unsettles assumptions about causality and identity. Its cleverness has inspired debate about time travel as a plot device, the moral implications of closed-loop scenarios, and the depiction of gender transition in mid-20th-century science fiction. Critics and readers have both praised the narrative ingenuity and questioned the story's emotional and ethical implications, particularly in how it handles issues of consent and autonomy.
As an influential time-travel tale, it continues to be cited in discussions of predestination paradoxes and self-consistency. Its twist, an entire life folded into a single person, remains startling, and the story endures as a provocative exercise in narrative architecture that uses speculative technology to illuminate stark human loneliness and the strange comforts of a life that is at once fragmented and self-contained.