Robert Heinlein’s All You Zombies

In a scant handful of pages, Heinlein creates the perfect time travel story of all time and laid the foundation for his World as Myth novels that were written much later than as this was written in in 1958. He has been quoted as saying he wrote it in one day; not really surprising given the speed in 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 if you buy the book but the audiobook version of this 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. I’m fairly sure that they used old audio tapes and simply didn’t bother to clean them up.

So what should you listen to instead? Well that’s where a neat podcast called SFFaudio 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 two people you’d know from their voices if you met them on a dark night. And the production is spot on.

Now about this story. Essentially it’s a tale of 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 any of Heinlein’s World as Myth novels, 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 latter stories, 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 to SFFaudio for this story and do check the other spoken story productions from SFFaudio. You won’t be at all disappointed!