Time Loops and Identity: ‘All You Zombies’

This show features a detailed discussion on Robert Heinlein’s 1958 short story ‘All You Zombies,’ exploring its intricate themes related to time travel, paradoxes, and identity. Lifedeathscifi.com investigates the protagonist’s journey as a temporal agent who ends up being their own ancestor through a series of time loops. They dissect the complexities of the narrative, including gender transformation and the moral dilemmas posed. The conversation also touches on comparisons with other time travel stories and Heinlein’s portrayal of gender, concluding with thoughts on the potential impact of the story in contemporary times. Aside from ‘All You Zombies,’ we discuss Michael Crichton’s ‘Timeline’ and the series ‘Foundation,’ sharing our fascination with time travel theories and the evolution of sci-fi storytelling.

Chapters

00:00 Diving Into the Paradoxes of Time Travel
00:38 Introducing ‘All You Zombies’ and Its Complexities
05:19 The Intricacies of Time Travel and Its Consequences
21:45 Debating the Realities of Time Travel and Its Paradoxes
25:38 Doppelgangers and Identity: A Deep Dive
28:24 The Devices of Time Travel: A Sci-Fi Analysis
32:54 Gender, Identity, and Sci-Fi: A Critical Discussion
40:42 Reflecting on Time Travel Theories and Sci-Fi Media
46:13 Choosing the Next Sci-Fi Adventure
47:20 AI and the Future of Storytelling

Show notes

Zombies have been around since the 1940’s. Here is a Zombie comic book cover from around the time this story was written.

The Philadelphia Experiment

The Seattle Viking Ship, also known as the “Leif Erikson,” is a replica Viking ship located in Seattle, Washington. This ship is a tribute to Leif Erikson, the Norse explorer believed to have reached North America around the year 1000. The replica is situated in Ballard, a neighborhood with strong Scandinavian roots, and it serves as a cultural and historical landmark celebrating the heritage and contributions of Scandinavian immigrants in the Pacific Northwest.

PBS Einstein’s Quantum Riddle

Transcript: “All You Zombies” by Robert Heinlein

Diving Into the Paradoxes of Time Travel
Chris: [00:00:00] then realizes what has happened or something, but it doesn’t matter because in the end, Oh, so it’s a big mistake, right? Something like that’s interesting. But in the end, the question is, yeah, it’s outside of his control, right? It had to have happened because it must have happened because he’s in this loop,
Otherwise, you wouldn’t have existed in the first place, so how did that happen the first time? That’s the chicken or egg thing, yeah. And we’ve just lost every listener. No, no one is still here, alone. Yeah. I miss you dreadfully.
Eric: That’s the nervous part for me talking about something I’m going into that I don’t think I have very good answers for.
Yeah, here we are. Lifedeathscifi welcome should say welcome to a man who would never seduce himself or would you, is the question.
Chris: How’s that for a weird hook? See, we said it was going to be weird. [00:01:00] we went out looking for a paradoxical short story and found one.
Introducing ‘All You Zombies’ and Its Complexities
Eric: Right here at LifeDeathSciFi. Weird time travel. We’re talking about All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein. Back in 1958, he wrote this. And in this episode, I’m sure we will talk about zombies, time loops, and probably paradoxes.
Chris: Not the kind of zombies you may be thinking if you haven’t read it. Of course, if you haven’t read it, there will be spoilers. You might. Pause this, save it, come back, and join us another day. The spoilers tend to come quick on these recordings.
I feel like, yeah,
Eric: that’s true. That’s a good way to put it. They tend to come quick, and then you think. Did we say that or not? Did we give the spoiler?
Chris: alert? Yeah, we usually do. I’m not sure there’s enough of a pause there. I guess we need a special [00:02:00] device to go back in time and fix that.
Eric: That would be easy. That would make it easy.
Unraveling the Story: Time Loops and Identity
Chris: We meet our protagonists, protagonist in a future bar, 2000, Pop’s place. And we found out this,
Bartender, barkeep is a sort of secret agent, a temporal agent, a secret, clandestine one who travels back to fix things from the past. And by fix, we don’t really know, but he fixes things. He’s there to meet someone who, and here comes the spoilers, we later found out. Or should I say it that way?
He meets someone and begins to question that person, softly interrogating, if that’s not an oxymoron, to ask some questions to pull out and reveal a bit of That [00:03:00] person’s story. They bet a bottle, and the person at the bar begins to reveal their story.
Eventually, we find that this person at the bar, who used to be a woman, was impregnated by a brief lover who had a baby in a hospital. That baby was. Shortly thereafter, stolen and in the hospital, the doctors tell her that she is intersex.
She was born with male and female organs.
The doctor says that they need to, they had to remove her female organs, and they help her, they force her; this is forced, right? But she ends up transitioning to a male. She’s upset and wants to [00:04:00] avenge would love to meet the person who had impregnated her in the past and ghosted her just, disappeared, and the barkeep says that he knows this person. He can present him to him at this point, but to Jane, I think her name is Jane, takes her into this back room and then uses a time machine kind of surprises Jane with this time machine and brings the both of them to the past. It happens to be this moment about the time that she meets his lover and is impregnated, leaves him there, and then goes to. This is why it’s all tricky, but I thought a little; I had to slow down while reading it, too. So, leaves this Jane there. This new male is in 19- I can’t remember what it is; it was 1965 or 70, right around that point.
The Intricacies of Time Travel and Its Consequences
He then goes [00:05:00] over to the hospital a short time later, takes this baby back to 1945, leaves it at an orphanage, and then returns to where he left. Can I say male Jane? It’s just tricky to talk about the pronouns and all that stuff. But this temporal agent goes back to where you left the person he was looking for at the bar, and it turns out, and he says, I think you can figure out what’s happened here, right?
You’ve Fallen for yourself and become pregnant yourself and realize the baby he took was this baby that he brought back to early on, and that baby becomes him, right? And then, as he starts to say this, I’m nodding. The song starts playing at the bar, which I found here. Let’s hear it. He finds out that he is. It sounds funny. I know, but it really [00:06:00] is. Oh, I’m my own; I’m my own grandpa. He’s his own grandpa. Oh my god. How about that? That’s for sure.

Chris: That’s Lonzo and Oscar. I am my own grandpa. I’m my own grandpa. Yeah.
Eric: I remember hearing that I just didn’t get it. What’s the trick? What are you talking about?
I guess they’re talking about time travel.
Chris: Yeah. It has a time machine. This is definitely time travel. Taking the grandpa paradox to a very literal level here.
Reflecting on Heinlein’s Work and Its Impact
Eric: I read somewhere that Heinlein did this all in one day. Oh, is that right? Wrote this story all in one day.
Chris: It has that feel to it, right? It’s got an It’s got an energy like that. Yeah. I really like this piece. This makes me want to read more Heinlein. [00:07:00] we talked about, I think, was that what you were saying? Was that episode? Was it our first episode, Stranger in a Strange Land?
Eric: Our premier episode here on LifeDeathSciFi was a Heinlein story.
Chris: And we struggled with that one. We had really mixed feelings about Heinlein and how that work had aged in terms of its portrayal of gender, yeah, gender stereotypes.
Comparing Time Travel Narratives and Their Themes
Eric: And this one was spot on for that kind of stuff. I just finished a l B G T Q novel about time travel. And it was in the time travel genre. So, it was connected with this one when they were talking about transgender stuff.
Chris: What was the, do you remember the name of it offhand?
Eric: Thinking,
Chris: One Last Stop.
Eric: How did you know? Come on.
Chris: I just quickly searched online. I came up with 10 of the best LGBTQ+ time travel books from a proud geek.
One last stop. [00:08:00] Funny, emotional, sapphic, contemporary romance from Casey McQuiston with a bisexual main character, lesbian love interest, and a smart, magical twist. Nice blurb. That’s right.
Eric: I liked the explanation of time travel and what it did to the people in the time travel.
But I didn’t really believe the device for time travel. It’s a standard.
Chris: kind of thing. Wait, what are you talking about now? Ali? Zombies or One last stop. Oh, sorry.
Eric: One last stop. Oh, okay. So, for my review?
Chris: Yeah, I,
Eric: Okay, alright. I’m not sure it will make LifeDeathScifi, though. Just have that view.
Eric: We’re talking about All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein here, and we really haven’t had a good zombie discussion yet. That’s true. We’ve read books, whole books, about zombies. What was it? Z
Chris: Nation? World War Z. Yeah. That was my favorite.
That’s an [00:09:00] all-time favorite.
Eric: When Robert Heinlein wrote this in 1958, there wasn’t that kind of zombie genre around, so how we see zombies right now doesn’t connect with this story. And I thought, oh, maybe he just didn’t know zombies.
Oh no. Oh no, I was totally wrong on that. The zombie apocalypse movie came out. Or at least the first one. Back in 1950
Chris: something. Oh, okay. 50. Zombie apocalypse movie? Yeah,
Eric: 58, 59. I was going to pin up the poster for that 1955 because it’s great; it’s a cartoon with these guys fighting off zombies in a cafe,
Chris: pretty fun.
You’re okay. I’ll have to check that out. There are no zombies.
Eric: If I were Heinlein’s editor, I might say zombies; what else [00:10:00] could you put in there? Cause it doesn’t really fit. I don’t see the zombies in your story. Do you see zombies in this story?
Chris: I do, but not the kind we’re discussing here, right?
World War Z sounds like a zombie apocalypse. Yeah, it’s very misleading, in the end. It’s not, but I guess as a sort of click Baity title, we’re so inundated with zombie TV shows and all that.
Eric: It’s the season this, you saw a whole season of these, zombie,
Chris: right? Yeah. I loved The Last of Us; it was amazing. I can’t remember if we ever talked about that. Did you know where you were watching that?
Of course. Yeah. I think we talked about
Eric: it. We talked about it a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s a more believable zombie story than most of them.
Chris: The last of Us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Eric: If you believe in zombies at all.
Chris:. Yeah. Walking dead. I, yeah, I enjoyed that at the beginning of [00:11:00].
I didn’t really keep watching it, but I could have. It just gets a little redundant. I think over time that, that, that style, but I think that’s a graphic novel originally. I think that’s cool. Yeah. I don’t know. The first one. So, based on your research, you’d think it sounds like there was a film look at that title.
Eric: exactly. And back when he wrote this, he knew all about those kinds of zombies. Was he using it as an early form of
Chris: clickbait? Yeah, interesting.
If you could follow that plot summary, you would be amazing. It was a good plot summary. You are amazing. If you could follow that, I’m sorry, I tried. I didn’t really get the very ending there.
And so, I guess we could skip that. After all this has taken place, what has he really done there? He’s insured, and he’s in this loop. And so we could talk about it. Free will and that kind of thing, right? Maybe put a pin in that, but he’s in this sort of loop that he can’t escape from because he has to make sure that he himself is born and lives.
So, he’s stuck [00:12:00] in that cycle, and he’s meeting these other versions of himself. After he’s done all this, he goes back to his room. I picture this whole thing. And I think as I do a lot of stories like this, to me, it’s like a Blade Runner kind of scene in my mind, Blade Runner-ish.
So, he’s going back to some tiny little pod, right? That’s his home. Maybe the bed slides off the wall or whatever. He goes back to his room. Yeah. It says they’re these entry points.
I like that style, too. He’s got these kinds of data, and it’s like this entries journal. He says it’s 2200, 12th of January. He goes back, and he says, his eyes fell on the bylaws of time over his bed. Man, I think just for fun or read through those: Never do yesterday what should be done tomorrow? If at last, you do succeed, never try again. A stitch in time saves 9 billion.
A paradox may be [00:13:00] para doctored. It is earlier when you think ancestors are just people; even Jove nods. These are all like, I love this. Highline’s clearly having fun there. What were those old books where you get all these little maxims and sayings?
Oh,
Eric: yes. I remember those. Now, you can get them on YouTube.
Chris: Oh, is that right? Same kind of thing. But it reads like one of those. And they’re mesmerizing.
He says they didn’t inspire me the way they had when I was a recruit. I left that part out to him after revealing all this to Jane who comes into the bar.
He, in the end, leaves him now, right? In a place to become the recruit to join this service that he’s a part of and become. The person he is in later years. Yeah, so he makes sure all that happens.
Eric: You get this father-son vibe out of that place, that dialogue in the story.
Chris: And yeah, I guess I have to say it was [00:14:00] hero’s journey. He’s that avuncular. Yeah. Teacher-like figure that introduces him to a new world and short story, right? But trains him. And then, yeah, he ends up in a very different place, in the end, a different person.
Eric: I honestly felt it a little creepy because I could see what was going on, and it wasn’t a father-son at all and, and it was like, Oh, you a little bit.
Chris: you.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is
Eric: that’s what Heinlein does to
Chris: us? Oh, I think we’ll return to the loop in a minute. I just read this part. Yeah, they didn’t have these quotes or maxims, they didn’t inspire me the way they had when I was a recruit for 30 subjective years.
There are a lot of little things in the story that are fun, right? Subjective years of time jumping wears you down. I undressed and when I got down to the [00:15:00] hide, I looked at my belly. A cesarean leaves a big scar. But I’m so hairy now that I don’t notice it until I look for it. That’s this, that’s funny. Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.
This is a ring that was mentioned earlier. All the copies, I had said it was a worm in here. It says I don’t know what that means. That changes earlier in the story, but it says. The ring is a snake that eats its own tail forever and ever.
Cool symbol. Let me come back to that, Oro. What do you call it? The Oro Ouroboros symbol. And I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from? If I feel a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take, I did once, and you all went away.
So, I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me. [00:16:00] Jane is here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully. Wow. Yeah. I feel like this is a powerful ending. And I, the, so at first, the switch to second person was so striking, right?
We get this in the title taken, quote from here, it’s got the dashes on each side, clearly indicating it’s pulled out. All you use zombies. And my initial thought was readers. I thought that all the readers were zombies. Yeah. What? That’s not nice.
Yeah, it was aggressive, right? But there is some aggression at this moment. All you zombies, all these people seemingly living their lives. Unaware of something like this that may be happening around them or perhaps where they came from. And in a sense, I, I don’t think it’s the readers.
He does view the other iterations and versions of himself as these. Clueless, almost [00:17:00] zombie-like figures that are just marking passages of time. So that he himself can be realized in some way, he’s the real protagonist. These other versions of himself are just these empty zombie-like vessels that are a means to a meaningful Jane, and that’s him,
and yet without those things that create his identity, he feels alone and empty. It’s creating this headache, but he doesn’t want to do anything to cure the headache because it’s almost like he’d be destroying parts of himself, and then, he can’t live with him, and he can’t live without him a feeling he’s got.
Eric: And at that moment, where he was getting the headache, Jane, I was getting it too, ’cause I’m thinking about it. Then, this whole thing Heinlein does on purpose gives us the depth of Jane’s character, but not much depth, as with any of the other [00:18:00] characters.
So, we don’t, we don’t see those as important as
Chris: the Jane character. They feel a bit zombie-like, and so even, which is tricky. That’s a good point. Heinlein achieves real success here because it is. Earlier, Jane telling the story, and yet it’s really just filtered through the bar keep, this later Jane, so even though she’s telling it, she’s not really fleshed out any kind of way that has us feeling like she’s anything but a sort of zombie in the end, easier to believe that, right? Yeah. And I like the headache idea too, because I, yeah, you wonder, yeah. Did he have a headache when he was writing this at the end? Time travel hurts, and as a reader and a thinker, I am trying to work through these things. Yeah,
Eric: like I said at the beginning of the show, it’s just when you have these conversations, it’s hard because you’re not going to come up with an answer [00:19:00] that you like all the time or maybe not an answer at all.
So, that’s a hard conversation to have. You want to have some sense of, yeah, I know what’s going on, right? Yeah. There are times in
Chris: I really enjoyed this story. It had just enough confusion and ambiguity. There was a slow reveal here that I really appreciated.
There are some moments early on where I meant to list these all out, but I didn’t mark them where at first this barkeep wants. This is Jane’s earlier version of himself to reveal some things, and it’s almost like he needs certain things to happen, so he’s trying to make some connection. Yeah
Eric: that’s classic time travel stuff; all of a sudden, you find this diary that’s full of these entries, and it’s about you, and then you realize that [00:20:00] it’s in your own handwriting, and it’s a hundred years old, something like that kind of device, and the barkeep was that way for this story.
The way this was set up is a classic short story, pacing, and design. I appreciated that because we haven’t really read too many short stories, right? In life, death, sci-fi. Some of them have been tomes.
Chris: Yeah, this is the opposite of, say, the time shifts.
Yeah, the count is the counterweight to that. Yeah. So, he says things like this earlier. Jane says, okay. He began to start with, I’m a bastard. And Barkey says, no, no distinction around here. He snapped. My parents weren’t married, and the barkeep said there was no distinction. I insisted neither was mine.
So, he finds all this slowly, you’re like, okay. So, they’re both sort of orphans, right? We don’t know who their parents are. [00:21:00] And there are moments like that that are pretty cool. And we get, yeah, he says, this again I do a 100 percent bastard.
In fact, I added no one in my family ever marries all bastards. And he’s, oh, that I showed it to him. It looks like a wedding ring. I wear it to keep women off. It’s an antique. I bought it. In 1985, from a fellow operative, he had it fetched from a Christian creep. It says the worm, or an ouroboros, the world snake that eats its own tail forever without an end, the symbol of the great paradox,
so, he’s wearing this ring; there are hints to foreshadow that.
Debating the Realities of Time Travel and Its Paradoxes
Eric: Oh, I totally love those, and you’re right. This story has big parts that are so cool and fun to read. All right. I have a question for you. It’s right where we’re talking about Ouroboros and the ring and the time loop that this guy is in. What if he did take some of that free will and step [00:22:00] outside the loop? Would he disappear?
Chris: Back to the future?
Eric: Yeah. I already saw Fly’s photograph. Holding it up and going, oh no.
Chris: What do you think? Now, you’re going to give me a headache if I yeah, that’s always been such a weird sort of trope with the disappearing image or someone disappearing, but they would have to disappear,
If he didn’t go back and complete all those steps like he has, Okay.
Eric: So, he’s alive in the moment he’s there. If he doesn’t do all the next things, he won’t have another moment. Is that what you’re saying? If he steps outside of this time loop.
Chris: Oh, I see. See what you’re saying, disappear. Does he immediately disappear? I would say no. I think it seems logical to me. Like he would live out the rest of his life. And that would be the end of this sort of circle.
Eric: [00:23:00] Would he remember? Anything of his past?
Chris: I think he would be the last version of himself to remember it. That one version.
Eric: Isn’t that the way it is anyway?
Chris: Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. No. You’re right, though. Yeah. See, this is starting to hurt. No, he wouldn’t be able to exist. Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. He would be able to exist.
What am I saying? Of course not.
Eric: Another way to look at this story with the zombies is what he’s really talking about: his ancestors. Those people brought him to be what he is right now. This just tightens that circle in an icky kind of way. So, the ancestors aren’t spread out. When he’s talking about all the zombies,
I get this ancestor vibe…
Chris: You’ve made a strong point that we’re left with this. I don’t know. There must be a term for this.
I don’t [00:24:00] know what it is, but that chicken. Egg paradox, maybe it’s all the chicken egg paradox. I don’t know. We’re left with that, right? Because it suggests that he goes back in time at some point to fix something on that date. And so, he has these different sorts of missions, but that’s the one that it seems originally, he went there for some other reason, fell in love or was really attracted to himself.
Then realizes what has happened, but it doesn’t matter because in the end, it’s a big mistake, right? Something like that’s interesting. But in the end, the question is, yeah, it’s outside of his control, right? It had to have happened because it must have happened because he’s in this loop,
Otherwise, you wouldn’t have existed in the first place, so how did that happen the first time? That’s the chicken or egg thing, yeah. And we’ve just lost every listener. No, no one is still here, alone. Yeah. I miss you dreadfully.
Eric: [00:25:00]Very good. Holy smokes. I think we’ve solved…

Chris: That one, for no one is solving that. Yeah. So, I don’t know what else there is to say about it; I think your question about it being a sort of perversion is a moral dilemma there, is it?
Exploring Self-Love and Narcissism Through Time Travel
I don’t know how much you want to think about falling in love with yourself, but I don’t know if there’s necessarily a love there or an attraction or a physical attraction. Just look at,
Eric: Look at current politics, and you’ll find all sorts of people in love with themselves. If they could travel back in time, I’m sure they would do what they needed to do.
Doppelgangers and Identity: A Deep Dive
Yeah, that’s what I was listening to. I think I mentioned before that I was listening to Team Human Douglas Rushkoff’s dad. He was interviewing Naomi Klein, a writer and slash activist writer. Her latest book is a memoir about how [00:26:00] people began confusing her with Naomi Wolf, another writer and activist who used to do this work.
And they said, anyway, it’s been challenging, but she used to do, I thought, some really interesting stuff. I’m trying to think of the title of it, but some work with portrayals of beauty and advertising and the way women are portrayed. I can’t remember the exact title of it. Still, anyway, she wrote this book about doppelgangers, and it becomes a sort of vehicle to talk about this idea of doppelgangers in media and life. And how it really asks us to reflect on ourselves because we see ourselves in these doppelgangers. And so maybe. With this text, Heinlein ultimately asks us questions about ourselves and at what points are we zombies or are we, are we the main characters in our own lives, and how, yeah, okay.
Okay. Are we? I’ll go along with that. Yeah, how narcissistic is it to [00:27:00] think that it’s just our own iteration that is the most important and
Eric: How perverse is that, right? Now you’ve got me on your side. Yeah, that, that’s smart.
Chris: Yeah. So, I think, yeah, I think it raises questions like how much control do we have over our lives?
How narcissistic is it to think that we have control? Maybe it is perverse to try to maintain some sort of control. He goes to great lengths here just to make sure that he exists. Yeah. And it seems I think what you were suggesting was once you know that if you were to find out that you were your own grandfather, I feel like that should be that you should just, that should tell you something.
That should be the end, right? In some ways, it is like how perverse you are to go back and impregnate yourself just so that you can exist. There’s a real, yeah, hubris and arrogance there.
Eric: The whole thing is definitely a thought experiment that is…
Chris: worthwhile having.
Yeah. [00:28:00] Yeah. Twisted ride. Yeah. Fun ride. But a twisted one. Yeah. It’s a bit of a, yeah, carnival. A Show or something. It’s a bit twisted.
Eric: Yeah. That’s a good description. That’s a good description.
The Devices of Time Travel: A Sci-Fi Analysis
Chris: All right. We usually talk about devices. That’s sci-fi. It’s cool. It was a little different. I thought,
So, he takes him back. The protagonist, Jane, takes the younger Jane into this back room.
Eric: The Man from Uncle, the old spy secret agent, secret agency, you go through these special doors behind stuff. Some shelves or something spread open, and boom, there you are in this ultra-techie place that’s going to take you into, and then I can believe that I would be able to.
Yeah. Yeah. I like that. There’s movement there. You feel like we’ve gone through this threshold [00:29:00] doorway, you go into this back room, he could have pulled out, it says there’s like a, he’s got a case, right? So, it’s like a suitcase or some kind of briefcase and this metal case, and he could have pulled that out from behind the bar, but instead, he takes him into this other room.
Young Jane says where is he? She wants, he wants, that revenge. Barkeep says, okay, right away. I opened a case. The only thing in the room, which is a weird room, the only thing in the room is the case.
It was a U. S. F. Coordinates Transformer field kit series in 1992. Mod two is a beauty; it has no moving parts, is lightweight, has 23 kilos, is fully charged, and is shaped to pass as a suitcase. I had adjusted it precisely earlier that day. All I had to do was to shake out the metal net; this is interesting; this metal net limits the transformation field, which I did. What’s that? He demanded. Time machine. I said and tossed the net over [00:30:00] us. Hey! He yelled and stepped back. There is this technique to this. The net has to be thrown so that the subject will instinctively step back onto the metal mesh. Then, you close the net completely with both of you inside.
Otherwise, you might leave shoe soles behind or a piece of a foot. Or scoop up a slice of a floor, but that’s all the skill it takes. Some agents con a subject into the net. I tell the truth and use that instant of utter astonishment to flip the switch, which I did. Yeah. That was cool. I really like that part.
He’s been fishing the whole time. So, it makes sense. He’s a sort of fisherman. He’s got his catch. Yeah.
Eric: Okay.
Chris: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I thought that was a bit silly. And maybe there’s something comical and tragic about this whole story; there’s some dark humor throughout.
Eric: I think [00:31:00] almost every time travel story has similar moments. This one was very well done and fun to read.
In terms of sci-fi devices, there’s nothing else for us to work with. We have that one.
Chris: Sounds like you didn’t really enjoy that.
Eric: I appreciate that. It may be the first suitcase time machine of its kind. But since then, there have been many of those, so I’m looking back into the past through my experience with other devices that are very similar to this and thinking, eh, okay, yeah, that works for me.
It was well written and special for its time, but now it’s pretty average time travel.
Chris: Gear, okay. Okay. I thought the net was different, regardless. Yeah. Makes sense. It’s, yeah. Again, there’s some humorous to think about how you make as much sense at the time, and she [00:32:00] can make sense, but it, you got a little foot hanging out, or somebody wouldn’t like, they’re like, ah their hand goes through the net, and they lose a hand,
Eric: I can’t remember the name of the movie.
It’s driving me crazy, but that and that ship on which the U.S. Navy experimented with some other device. You know, the urban myth is that it was sent back in time and then came back, and yeah, people did get stuck in the halls, and their feet were through the deck and stuff like that.
What was the name of this? They made a movie out of it. The ship the whole thing that happened is called the Philadelphia experiment.
Gender, Identity, and Sci-Fi: A Critical Discussion
No. But I just have heard that time travel movie must see. Oh, check it out. Philadelphia experiment. Okay. Should I just say, and should we talk about [00:33:00] Jane’s earlier life as a, she works as a, what’s the right way to phrase it?
She ends up working as when Japan invaded in World War II; this is what it reminded me of. So, when Japan invaded South Korea and the Korean peninsula and China, they forced the women they conquered to be like these comfort women right for these military soldiers abroad.
Early in this story, young Jane, female Jane, works as a sort of comfort woman by choice, right? for these astronauts for these travelers.
Chris: So, she ends up working for them because they have these. I don’t remember the spaceship. It doesn’t go into [00:34:00] great detail, but it says it has these acronyms, right?
Short story. Yeah. So, she ends up working for, at first, the Women’s Emergency National Corps Hospitality and Entertainment Section, which is abbreviated as WENCHES, right? Yeah, so she decided to join the WENCHES. I
Eric: think I know what happened to me here. I think I’m reading this story.
I have questions just about the misogyny of Heinlein due to the first story we read, and when I saw that, I thought I couldn’t; I’ve got to move on. I’ve got to get past this to get into the story. I, that’s exactly what I
Chris: I was wondering. Cause I, when I read that’s why I don’t remember it.
Oh no, here we go again. And she says what they now call my version of space angels, auxiliary nursing group. Extraterrestrial legions. And then it’s abbreviated later as angels, right? It’s the name of the [00:35:00] group. I hesitate to bring that up because, comparing it to Stranger Strange Land, it felt more to me like the misogyny was coming from The characters and maybe the context there a little bit in a believable way and not from the author himself more so than the, it just felt unnecessary and stranger in a strange land. And here, I think maybe because of the,
There’s a certain sort of. Yeah. Types he’s playing with, one’s the sort of, like you said before, maybe this gruff rough around the edges, detective slash, military type, and obviously there’s all types of people, right?
We’re not saying that all military people are blah, blah, blah; of course, we’re not saying that.
Eric: Fits in with your Blade Runner persona.

Chris: I imagine that later version of. Like in my head, Jane could easily have been played by Harrison Ford. I can see that. Yeah. I don’t know who plays young Jane. [00:36:00] Yeah. Maybe it doesn’t work. I don’t think they don’t talk about the degree to which she changes other than body hair; I think that kind of thing.
Chris: Maybe it’s more of a. I’m having a hard time picturing young Jane as Harrison Ford, whereas I don’t know, we go like they
Eric: can do anything with
Chris: Technology. Yeah, that’s true. I don’t know if Harrison Ford is hitting on a young female Harrison Ford. Is Jared, am I going to get myself in trouble here?
Is Jared Lido, or is something hitting on young Jared Lido? I don’t know. Oh my God. Tim, who’s cool these days. I said it was a mistake in reference, like Timothy Charlemagne. It’s probably could be hitting on young Timothy Charlemagne or something. Anyway
If Heinlein is raising questions for us, I think as the best texts do, is he intentionally or not raising questions about portrayals of [00:37:00] gender?
And here he’s playing with. Extremes in some way where we’ve got somebody who’s, of course, working by choice in this field that there’s a clear Sexual exchange happening. As she’s doing this work before, she’s later forced through this transition from female to male. In other words, this story emphasizes this change from one female type to another male type. That’s very different. It emphasizes that difference, right? Shortly after it, she talks about her work there, and we then get that she is surely after that in the hospital and has this baby stolen and then has this forced sexual reassignment surgery, right?
Yeah.
Eric: Yeah, good questions.
Chris: Yeah, for sure. Good question. We get this sort of show chauvinistic, male type, this [00:38:00] later version. And yet, with the sensitivity of an unmarried mother that she’s referred to as we meet this ghostwriter, yeah, the Jane that first shows up at the bar is writing these stories from the angle of an unmarried mother.
Even though she’s male.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, no, I think I’ve stuck my foot far enough into my mouth, or did I, would you like to start all over again? No, I don’t know. I like to think.
Are you in that mood? Try to think through some things like that. It’s a sensitive topic. I think Heinlein’s writing in that period, could someone publish, say, Asimov or some sci-fi magazine, a work like this today?
I saw it was originally rejected by Playboy way back when I, yeah, I don’t know for what reason, but they had rejected it.
Eric: So why would you think that they [00:39:00] wouldn’t?
Chris: I wouldn’t publish this. Yeah. I’m just wondering out loud. Cause I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m informed enough to speak in depth, but I certainly think I am dealing with this.
Yeah. Issue of gender and of a sort of forced sexual reassignment surgery. I don’t know. Does this approach it in a way that is the right way to phrase it? I don’t know.
Eric: I think in some areas, okay. In some, not. It’s a crazy political time that we live in for these kinds of issues.
These issues, in my opinion, should be human issues, not political.
Chris: So yeah, no, I would hate to see it completely Politicized somehow. Yeah, I don’t mean that. But I guess that’s where the trouble comes in, perhaps. I guess it is right. That’s what I guess.
I’d like to see some sort of analysis of this—a great university paper from somebody in gender [00:40:00] studies who looks at this short story.
Eric: Historically, it would be pretty interesting, I think, what people said at the time and what that thread brings us to today. I think that’d be pretty interesting.
Reflecting on Time Travel Theories and Sci-Fi Media
Chris: You’re sitting at the bar at Pop’s place next to a jar of pickled eggs, sipping on a shot of old underwear; what will you be chatting about? Do you want me to go first?
Yeah. Go first. I got something. Oh, you got something. Go for it. Yeah. Yeah. What do you get?
No, you go first. I, yeah. I don’t have a whole lot to say other than just some, I guess, just to share what I’ve been enjoying. I have been thoroughly enjoying season two of Foundation Oh, on, lots of
Eric: time travel in that story.
Chris: I, yeah, there is. There is. Yeah.
I’m just, I don’t know. Season one, I think I enjoyed it, and [00:41:00] maybe it just took a full season for me to fully understand it. I don’t know if there’d be enough color and detail to it. It’s such a huge story, covering so much time and space. And I think I’ve gotten there at a place where I just want to spend more time in this world, whatever planet or great world building.
Yeah. And I think maybe it just took a lot of season one to get that world built for me, but I’m thoroughly enjoying season two. And I’m just mesmerized by Lee pace. The guy who plays Empire.
Eric: Oh, yeah. I think he’s been digitally enhanced in some way because he looks in some scenes…
Chris: He’s like a Greek god. Huge.
Eric: How is that? It’s got to be some kind of,
Chris: Super being. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking the same thing.
Eric: Pouring all over him. Yeah. [00:42:00] And I love Giselda the robot.
Chris: right person. Yeah. I never, I’ve never, I haven’t read the whole series, and I feel like maybe I should. I know we talked about the first, the Foundation first one of the trilogy. And I just haven’t read the others. I should go back, and yeah. Reread that.
Eric: In the second season, do you remember the first book? I’m pretty sure where they sent out from Trantor. I think it sends out emissaries to different planets to sell stuff and trade and all of that.
And that was in the second season. So that
Chris: was, so you’re watching it as well of
Eric: God. Yeah. I think I’m all caught up. I think I might be one episode behind, but. Yeah, I think it’s pretty fascinating.
Chris: Yeah, so just enjoy that.
Eric: But I’d be sidling up to the bar and talking about theories of time and space because I’ve been watching all of these [00:43:00] YouTube videos about whether time travel is possible.
What is time itself? What is reality? And, I must say, there is a very slippery slide down these YouTube videos when you start watching them. And it makes me question even the substance of reality itself.
Chris: Wow, Times mixed in, you have to share.
We’ll have to share a few of those in the show notes. I’m curious to watch them as well.
Yeah, I think it gets into a place where we talk about this. There’s a lot we don’t understand yet,
Eric: See Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about. Yep, and all of these shows, and well, we’re not quite sure about this or this, so we need one more piece of the theory. And it’s, oh, okay, then.
Chris: what? Yeah. It’s crazy. What might we know in a hundred years? I went to [00:44:00] the Nordic Museum here in Ballard, Seattle, for the first time, and Ballard’s a neighborhood in Seattle. Much of the Pacific Northwest and Ballard, in particular, was originally settled by.
Nordic peoples, and in this museum—it didn’t say exactly where in Seattle—there’s this video. I would have thought this was like a deep fake if I’d seen it on YouTube, but there’s no way it is. I think it’s a video of this Viking ship arriving in Seattle at the port in 1909.
And I know. All right. That’s what you’re saying. I could find it on YouTube for the show, but it’s all pixelated as they come in. It looks like a really terrible pixelated copy of some of Charlie Chaplin’s films. And There’s this huge crowd, and there’s these guys with top hats, at all the dock, and these Vikings come in with their, I don’t know what you call those types of ships, the sort of drag it along ships.
Yeah, [00:45:00] figureheads on the side, and they’ve got their spears and shields, and they’re hopping off the boat and shaking hands. The guys at the top had, that’s the end of the video, or no, there’s a couple of images of them, people posing next to them, and that’s the end of the video.
And one, it was just like, yeah, I guess there were videos back then. Pretty rare. But there are some moving images, no sound, obviously. But it, yeah, it just, it was this strange experience of traveling back, and it came to mind as you were talking, because I just thought, wow, that’s just over, what, 115 years ago, or 114 years ago.
And it seems so. So long ago, right? We’ve so many things have changed since.
Eric: it’s got pieces of that anachronistic time travel, sprinkly magic dust. Love stories like that. And there are so many of them. Yeah. Like this Philadelphia experiment, a ship I think they were testing some kind of light laser and.
The [00:46:00] experiment went bad and bounced out of time and back into time. And when it did, that’s when people got hurt because they didn’t know what was going on.
Choosing the Next Sci-Fi Adventure
Chris: Yeah. I’ll have to look into that. What are we reading next?
Eric: Okay.
Chris: That’s a good
Eric: question. Honestly, we’ve been going in chronological order, and we’ve done a pretty good job with the short stories that put us in that.
So, I don’t know. Do we want to continue with that?
All right. You have mentioned the Michael Crichton one a couple of times. Do you want me to spoil a little bit of it?
Chris: No spoilers.
I do. Yeah, that’s so hypocritical. No, I gave you a spoiler warning.
Eric: Oh, I just did. And you said no. Okay.
Chris: I understand. So, Timeline by Michael Crichton. Okay.
Eric: Michael Crichton is such a good writer.
AI and the Future of Storytelling
Chris: [00:47:00] That just reminded me I didn’t do a whole lot of research, much looking online for our discussion today, but
If there was a good description in Cora, which I usually never look at, like Cora answers or whatever, that popped up, and I happened to glance at it. And in the middle of that, somebody had posted an AI description of this, of a summary for all you zombies. All you zombies. I don’t remember, snake eating the tail or echo here. I asked what is meant by All You Zombies in Robert a Heinlein. In the Robert A. Heinlein short story of the same name, ChatGPT said, okay,
Eric: So, this is ChatGPT AI here. We’re not even talking to a human. I’m interested in the response.
Chris: [00:48:00] Just four sentences here. I think four or five, all you zombies. It’s a short story by Robert A. Heinlein that explores themes of time, travel, identity, and gender. The title refers to the main characters, who are all revealed to be, quote, zombies, or people who have been replaced with clones of themselves.
In the story, the main character, a temporal agent, is sent back in time to prevent a catastrophic event but instead becomes the father of his own mother. A paradox that leads to the revelation that the main character is also a Zombie. The story explores the idea that our identities are not fixed but rather are shaped by our experiences and the choices we make.
Eric: That sounds like, yeah, not quite there, but it will be there pretty soon. It’s going to be.
Chris: scary. Not exactly clones, right? But
I guess editors are inundated with the Oh, what are the [00:49:00] short pieces that can make a lot of money for people?
Eric: And I think we’ve talked about this before there’ve been, I don’t know, and if this is still a trend, but when I read about it, it was a problem for reviewers because there were, instead of maybe five stories to review, they had 50 stories to read because, it was so easy for people to just fit this into chat GPT or, some kind of AI device and, they said it was really.
A waste of time because they could pick ‘am out most of the time. And I and I would pick that one out as one. But like we’ve both said, it’s coming pretty fast.
Chris: Yeah. I think that’s pretty close to the point that you won’t be able to pick that. Yeah. A skim at a skim read, he’d be like, okay, yeah.
That’s a summary. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Eric: It’s the deep fake videos that are spooking me. Because really, what do you believe now?
Chris: Yeah, that’s it. As soon as I see it, I believe less. Yeah, video, I’m like, is [00:50:00] that real? You know, all right, Michael Crichton, Timeline.
Eric: Oh, you’re going to enjoy it. Yeah, I’m going to read it again too.
Chris: Yeah, excited. Third time. Wow. All right. You must like it. All right. We could do a different one. Yeah.
Eric: The thing is, I want to tell you a little bit about the story, but you’re not letting me.
I, and I, I think that’s okay. That’s fair and everything. Okay. I won’t even say that.
Chris: All right. I’m going to try to look at this online. Yeah. A review of Timeline. Yeah. Okay. All right. By Michael Crichton on THACO. Okay. Alright, I’m not going to look. Okay. A pleasure. I’ll see you at the Spaceman’s Ball.
Spaceman’s Ball.