1947 short story reprinted in anthology The Saturday Evening Post Reader of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1966). The Green Hills of Earth. PDF WITH TEXT download. This book contains five short stories by one of the best sci-fi writers, Robert A. I read sci-fi tales as a youth, as my father who was very smart did, and as my son does. Heinlein’s first short story was Life Line, which he had written for a contest but instead sold it to Astounding Science-Fiction in 1939 for more than the contest would have paid for first prize. Below is a list of Robert A. Heinlein’s books in order of when they were originally published.
Heinlein juveniles are the young adult novels written by Robert A. Heinlein. The twelve novels were published by Scribner's between 1947 and 1958, which together tell a single story of space exploration. A thirteenth, Starship Troopers, was submitted to Scribner's but rejected and instead published by Putnam. A fourteenth novel, Podkayne of Mars, is often listed as a 'Heinlein juvenile', although Heinlein himself did not consider it to be one.
In addition to the juveniles, Heinlein wrote two short stories about Scouting for boys and three short stories with Puddin', a teenage female protagonist, for girls.
- 1The Scribner's juveniles
The Scribner's juveniles[edit]
- Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
- Space Cadet (1948)
- Red Planet (1949)
- Farmer in the Sky (1950)
- Between Planets (1951)
- The Rolling Stones (also known as Space Family Stone, 1952)
- Starman Jones (1953)
- The Star Beast (1954)
- Tunnel in the Sky (1955)
- Time for the Stars (1956)
- Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)
- Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)
James Gifford wrote, 'It is not often recognized that [the juveniles] are a reasonably consistent 'Future History' of their own'.[1] The dozen novels do not share any characters and do not form a strict chronological series; the later novels are not sequels to the earlier ones. They nonetheless tell a single story of space exploration.[2] The first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, is about an effort to reach the Moon. The next few (through The Rolling Stones) revolve around interplanetary travel within the solar system. The next few (Starman Jones through Time for the Stars) revolve around various versions of the early phase of interstellar travel. In the next novel (Citizen of the Galaxy), interstellar travel is well-established and easy for humans, and the central problem is one of the maintenance of law and order in the galaxy. The protagonist of the next and last Scribner's juvenile, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, travels to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and interacts with an intergalactic civilization. The last book submitted to Scribner's, Starship Troopers, portrays an interstellar war between mankind and several other species.
The intended readership was teenage boys, but the books have been enjoyed by a wide range of readers. Heinlein wanted to present challenging material to children, such as the firearms for teenagers in Red Planet. This led to 'annual quarrels over what was suitable for juvenile reading'[3] with Scribner's editors.
Reception[edit]
Groff Conklin wrote in 1955 that 'Nobody but nobody can beat Heinlein in the writing of teen-age science fiction'.[4]Jack Williamson wrote: '[An] inspiring theme of space conquest unifies the dozen Scribner's titles ... The books, taken together, tell an epic story of the expansion of mankind across the planets of our own Sun and the stars beyond. ... a generally consistent story of the future conquest of space. The first, Rocket Ship Galileo, begins in a backyard shortly after World War II, with three boys testing a primitive rocket motor. The last, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, ends with the triumphant return of its young hero from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud... Nobody has written a more convincing and inspiring future human epic.'[2]
Starship Troopers[edit]
Classic Short Stories Pdf
Starship Troopers was written as a juvenile for Scribner's but the publisher rejected it,[5] ending Heinlein's association with Scribner's.[6] He wrote, 'I am tired of being known as a 'leading writer of children's books', and nothing else.'[7]Putnam published the novel in 1960.[8]
Scouting stories for boys[edit]
- 'Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon', 1949
- 'Tenderfoot in Space', 1958
When he returned to writing after World War II, Heinlein sought to diversify beyond pulp science fiction. The Scouting stories, originally printed in the Boy Scouts of America magazine Boys' Life, were part of that effort.[9]Farmer in the Sky, which also had a strong connection to Scouting, was serialized in Boys' Life under the title 'Satellite Scout'. Heinlein considered writing another Boy Scout story called 'Polar Scout' in conjunction with a planned trip to Antarctica in early 1964, with the goal of releasing a collection of Scouting-related stories as a juvenile book. The trip did not take place and the author never wrote 'Polar Scout'.[10]
Puddin' stories for girls[edit]
- 'Poor Daddy', 1949
- 'Cliff and the Calories', 1950
- 'The Bulletin Board', 1951
Upon delivery of one of his early juveniles, his editor at Scribner's wished someone would write stories for girls.[11] Heinlein took this as a challenge and wrote a short story for girls. The story, a first-person tale featuring Maureen 'Puddin', appeared under the byline 'R. A. Heinlein' in Calling All Girls magazine. He wrote two more, and planned four additional stories with the goal of publishing a collection titled Men Are Exasperating, but he never wrote any more and the Puddin' stories have never been collected in one volume.
Podkayne of Mars[edit]
Heinlein wrote 'I grew so fond of Maureen [from the Puddin' stories] that I helped her to get rid of that excess weight, changed her name to 'Podkayne,' and moved her to Mars (along with her unbearable kid brother).'[11] Heinlein felt that a particular ending for Podkayne of Mars, published in 1963, was dramatically necessary to the story. Early readers hated it, however, and he reluctantly changed it. In 1995 the book was rereleased with both the published and original endings.
Podkayne's categorization as a 'Heinlein juvenile' is unclear. Many reviewers list it with the juveniles,[12] and it is narrated by a teenager, but Heinlein himself did not regard it as a 'juvenile'.[13]
Heinlein Short Stories Pdf Download
Ties to other works[edit]
English Short Stories Pdf
Heinlein wrote a few series of linked stories and novels. Three of the juveniles are connected to his Future History. Hazel Stone of The Rolling Stones also appears in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The Number of the Beast, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Space Cadet is set after 'The Long Watch', which appears on Heinlein's Future History chart. The protagonist of Farmer in the Sky, Bill Lermer, plays the song 'The Green Hills of Earth' on his accordion; the song is featured in the story of the same name from Heinlein's Future History. Farmer also refers to the 'Space Patrol,' the interplanetary peace-keeping organization described in Space Cadet.
The Mars of Red Planet seems to be the Mars of Stranger in a Strange Land; Jack Williamson writes that 'The Martians in this story have a special interest, because they are the educators of Valentine Michael Smith [and] they display the same appalling powers that Smith brings back to Earth.' [2]Have Space Suit—Will Travel mentions a recently established lunar base and an 'infant Luna City', possible early references to what Heinlein developed into the lunar outpost of his Future History and the lunar colony of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Other juveniles do not as a whole integrate easily into those series. For example, the timeline for interstellar travel in Time for the Stars does not fit into the Future History. Neither does the Arachnid War from Starship Troopers, nor the appearance of the advanced civilization in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud from Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Some of the juveniles which do not integrate with each other, nevertheless share similar elements of setting. The Mars of several of the books (Red Planet, Between Planets, The Rolling Stones, and Time for the Stars) has indigenous, intelligent (even dangerous) life, but they are not necessarily the same Martians in each book.
References[edit]
- ^Gifford, Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion, 2000, p. 24
- ^ abcJack Williamson, 'Youth Against Space: Heinlein's Juveniles Revisited', in Robert A. Heinlein (1978), ed by Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg
- ^Virginia Heinlein, Grumbles from the Grave, p. 83.
- ^Conklin, Groff (March 1955). 'Galaxy's 5 Star Shelf'. Galaxy Science Fiction. pp. 95–99.
- ^Gifford, James. 'The Nature of Federal Service in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers'(PDF). Retrieved March 4, 2006.
- ^Causo, Roberto de Sousa. 'Citizenship at War'. Archived from the original on March 15, 2006. Retrieved March 4, 2006.
- ^October 10, 1960, Grumbles from the Grave, p. 226.
- ^'Biographies of Robert and Virginia Heinlein'. The Heinlein Society. Retrieved March 4, 2006.
- ^Expanded Universe, p. 276.
- ^December 28, 1963, Grumbles from the Grave, p. 192-193.
- ^ abExpanded Universe, p. 354.
- ^Alexei Panshin, Heinlein in Dimension
- ^March 10, 1962, Grumbles from the Grave, p. 86.
External links[edit]
- Works by or about Robert A. Heinlein in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heinlein_juveniles&oldid=917044243'
'—All You Zombies—' | |
---|---|
Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre(s) | Science fiction |
Published in | The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction |
Publication date | 1959 |
''—All You Zombies—'' is a science fictionshort story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was written in one day, July 11, 1958, and first published in the March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine after being rejected by Playboy.
The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel. In 1980, it was nominated for the Balrog Award for short fiction.[1]
''—All You Zombies--'' further develops themes explored by the author in a previous work: 'By His Bootstraps', published some 18 years earlier. 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.
- 1Plot
Plot[edit]
''—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 underwent sexual reassignment surgery); he thus turns out to be the offspring of that union, with the paradoxical result that he is his own mother and father. As the story unfolds, all the major characters are revealed to be the same person, at different stages of her/his life.
Narrative order of events[edit]
Timeline of ''—All You Zombies--'' in diagrammatic form
The story involves an intricate series of time-travel journeys (see diagram). It begins with a young man speaking to the narrator, the Bartender, in 1970. The two of them relate in that both of them are from unmarried parents. The Bartender remarks that no one in his family ever gets married, including him. He wears an Ourobouros ring. 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.
Cajoled 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. While a fairly ugly teenager in 1963, she was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by an older man. During the delivery of her child, doctors discovered she was intersex, with internalized male sex organs as well as female sex organs. Complications during delivery rendered the female organs unviable and forced them to give her a gender reassignment. The baby was kidnapped by a mysterious older gentleman, and not seen again. The Unmarried Mother then had to adjust to life as a man, despite an upbringing which left him unqualified for 'men's' jobs; he had planned to get into space as a sex worker for male workers and colonists. Instead he used his secretarial skills to type manuscripts, and eventually began writing.
Professing sympathy, the Bartender offers to take him to the abandoning seducer, whom the Unmarried Mother wishes revenge on. The Bartender guides him into a back room, where he (Bartender) uses a time machine to take them to 1963, and sets the young man loose. The bartender goes forward eleven months, kidnaps a newborn baby and takes it to 1945, leaving it in an orphanage. He returns to 1963 and picks up the Unmarried Mother, who was instinctively attracted to his younger female self and has seduced and impregnated her. The Bartender nudges him to connect the dots, and realize that the seducer, the young woman, the baby, and the time traveler are all him.
The Bartender then drops the Unmarried Mother at an outpost of the Temporal Bureau, a time-traveling secret police force that manipulates events in history, to protect the human race. He has just created and recruited himself.
Finally the Bartender returns to 1970, arriving a short time after he left the bar. He allows a customer to play 'I'm My Own Grandpa' on the jukebox, having yelled at the customer for playing the song before he left. Closing the bar, he time travels again to his home base. As he beds down for a much deserved rest, he contemplates the scar left over from the Caesarean section performed when he gave birth to his daughter, father, mother, and entire history. He thinks, 'I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?'
Title[edit]
The title of the story, which includes both the quotation marks and dashes,[2] is actually a quotation from a sentence near the end of the story itself (taken from the middle of the sentence, hence the dashes indicating edited text before and after the title).
Chronological order of events[edit]
As the story is told as a disjointed point of view reference by several other points thereafter, this is the actual chronological history of 'Jane' according to the story, although the story itself is still a classic example of a time paradox.
- On September 20, 1945, the Bartender drops off baby Jane at an orphanage. She grows up there. She dreams of joining one of the 'comfort organizations' dedicated to providing R&R for spacemen.
- Nearly 18 years later, the man who refers to himself as 'an unmarried mother' is dropped off at April 3, 1963, by the Bartender. He meets and, after some weeks of dating, seduces and impregnates the 17-year-old Jane, who has an intersex condition. From Jane's point of view, he then disappears. Actually, he has been retrieved by the Bartender, and taken to 1985 (see sixth bullet point).
- Jane learns that she is pregnant by the now-missing unknown man. After giving birth by C-section, she is found to be a 'true hermaphrodite' who has been severely damaged by the pregnancy and birth; on waking she learns that she has been subjected (without her consent) to a 'sex change' which reassigns her sex to male.
- On March 10, 1964, the Bartender kidnaps the baby and takes her/him back in time to the orphanage (see first bullet point). Jane, now male, becomes a stenographer, and then a writer. Whenever he is asked his occupation, he replies, somewhat truculently, 'I'm an unmarried mother—at four cents a word. I write confession stories.' He becomes a regular at the bar where the narrator, the Bartender, works, but does not interact with him significantly for six years.
- On November 7, 1970, the Bartender meets the Unmarried Mother, yells at the customer playing 'I'm My Own Grandpa', conducts the Unmarried Mother into the back office, and takes him back to 1963 to 'find' (and, ostensibly, get revenge upon) the man who got him pregnant (see second bullet point). He returns to the bar, seconds after going into the back room, and allows the customer to play the song. From his own point of view, he has carried out his mission of ensuring his own existence.
- On August 12, 1985, the Bartender travels to 1963 and retrieves the Unmarried Mother -- whom he had left there (then?) during the events of the fifth (and second) bullet point(s) -- to the Rockies base and enlists him (actually a younger version of himself) in the Temporal Bureau.
- On January 12, 1993, the Bartender, who is also Jane/mother/father/Unmarried Mother, arrives back at his base from 1970 to think about his life.
Reception[edit]
Philosopher David Lewis considered ' '—All You Zombies—' ' and 'By His Bootstraps' to be examples of 'perfectly consistent' time travel stories.[3] Stating that it and other Heinlein time-travel stories 'force the reader into contemplations of the nature of causality and the arrow of time', Carl Sagan listed 'All You Zombies' as an example of how science fiction 'can convey bits and pieces, hints and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader'.[4]
Film adaptation[edit]
The Spierig brothers directed the Australian science fiction filmPredestination (2014) based on the story. The film starred Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook.[5]
See also[edit]
- Other stories about being descended from oneself
- In television
- 'Ouroboros' (Red Dwarf episode)
- 'Roswell That Ends Well:' (Futurama episode)
Notes[edit]
- ^'Locus Magazine award index, 1980 Balrog'. Archived from the original on 2015-09-12. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
- ^The Illustrated List of Heinlein Fiction
- ^Lewis, David (April 1976). 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel'. American Philosophical Quarterly. 13 (2): 145–152. JSTOR20009616.
- ^Sagan, Carl (1978-05-28). 'Growing up with Science Fiction'. The New York Times. p. SM7. ISSN0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-12-12.
- ^'Arclight Films Snags the International Rights for the Spierig Brothers' Predestination'. Anythinghorror.com. Retrieved 3 July 2017.
References[edit]
- Robert A. Heinlein. Grumbles from the Grave. Del Rey, 1980.
External links[edit]
- 'All You Zombies...' title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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