Socio-Economics in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘” - All You Zombies - “’
Socio-Economics in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘” - All You Zombies - “’
Although the time-travel story has long been thought of as somewhat passé, largely due to almost everyone having seen the movie, The Time Machine (1960; remake 2002) based on the turn of the 1895 novel by science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, and almost everyone has at least seen an episode or two of the UK’s long running BBC TV serial series, Doctor Who (1963-), about a ‘Time Lord’, originally played by William Hartnell, but the face of ‘the Doctor’, changing every few years, with the plot device of transformation ensuring new actors and continuity, while the character jaunts about time and space in his Tardis, disguised as an early 20th century police box, little thought has been given to the socio-economic impact of time travel.
United States’ science fiction ‘Grand Master’ (1974), Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), however, in writing his 1959 short story ‘” - All You Zombies - “’ raised a few eyebrows with his story of ‘the Unmarried Mother’, an individual born as a hermaphrodite, but having a sex change operation, `I sent for the Chief of Surgery while I got the baby out, then we held a consultation with you on the table - and worked for hours to salvage what we could. You had two full sets of organs, both immature, but with the female set well enough developed for you to have a baby. They could never be any use to you again, so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man.’1 The twist is that the baby is the mother and the father, who kidnaps the baby from the hospital and takes it to an orphanage, `I was horse-faced and buck-toothed, flat-chested and straight-haired.` Training for an elite military service corps, `Women’s Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen` (WHORES), the narrator-protagonist relates: `... if they accepted me, they would fix my buck teeth, put a wave in my hair, teach me to walk and dance and how to listen to a man pleasingly, and everything else - plus training for the prime duties. They would even use plastic surgery if it would help - nothing too good for our Boys.’ After fertilizing herself and giving birth to herself, ‘the Unmarried Mother’ confesses, `It's a shock to have it proved to you that you can't resist seducing yourself.` However, the surgery is typical of the United States of America, where interventionist surgery upon human futanarian women is sanctioned by the government in all cases to ensure that men and women are the only genders, whereas women’s seed is biblical, as Eve was told her ‘seed’ (Gen: 3. 15) would prevail by God.
As a Time Corps operative, the narrator-protagonist prepares to pick himself up, `I opened a case, the only thing in the room; it was a U.S.F.F. Coordinates Transformer Field Kit, series 1992, Mod. II - a beauty, no moving parts, weight twenty-three kilos fully charged, and 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 which limits the transformation field.` Preparing for bed, having recruited himself for the Time Corps: `I know where I came from - but where did all you zombies come from?’ Given mandatory gender surgery to ensure the manufacture of men and women, as a single male brained transvestite TV creature wearing each other’s clothes, it isn’t as difficult to see where the zombies are headed. Falling asleep, reverie reveals: `You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me - Jane - here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!` The real life transgender story is that of summer 1976, Montreal, Canada, gold-medal winning Olympic Games decathlete, Bruce Jenner, who kept his penis and declared he’d become a ‘woman’, Caitlyn, albeit rather butch. There’s a definite distinction between the more muscular and hirsute male ‘futanarian’, the term for ‘women’s seed’, and female, which remains valid, for example, male fut, pronounced ‘foo’, has ever devoured the human species in its cannibal wars, that is, as its food, although women have all of the host wombs by nature; so they’re the human footrace trying to run itself and escape from being foo’.
For men, it’s ring slavery for property. The human species isn’t permitted to time travel, or it’d perceive its castrated state, that is, women’s seed would see that they’d been turned into a TV by the slaving serpent’s seed, which is what God promised the woman, Eve, expelled from the paradise of Eden with the first man, Adam, for accepting the ‘fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, which it was death to taste, from the angel, Satan, turned into a serpent by the creator, God, for rejecting God’s promise that the human host would be greater than the angelic, saying in response to Eve’s protesting that the ‘fruit of the tree of life’, that is, immortality, was God’s promise, ‘You shall be as gods.’ (Gen: 3. 5) Having been turned into a serpent, the serpent’s seed of Satan turned the human race into a TV, that is, men institutionalized marriage as a slave ring whereas, as a hermaphroditic species, women don’t by nature marry.
What Heinlein’s depicting with his Time Corps in ‘” - All You Zombies - “’ is a nascent gang of property thieves, possessing like demons whatever they can, which is what men have been doing; since women fought for the right to own property in the 19th century. Before that women were categorised as chattels. Owned as property by their ring slaver in marriage to whatever dowry they’d brought to the wedding from their father’s husbanding of themselves, for example, and their mother, as ‘good breeding stock’. Although much has been said and written about copyright, for example, pop culture stars complaining that there are lookalikes and fakes who make money out of their resemblance to the performer or artist, one instance of time-travelling by a woman encountering her previous self before castration would turn their stars into mass producers of opus the size of which few have been able to dream imaginable, because there’d be no discernible end to the plethora of alternative personalities derivable from a scenario familiar to readers of Heinlein sympathetic to his fecund and potent ‘Unmarried Mother’ character.
Although there’d be the obvious danger of farming oneself as a slave, which is what God directed Eve’s seed against, the more obvious socio-economic benefits are to a workers co-operative, ‘You shall crush the head of the serpent with your foot, but he will bruise your heel.’ (Gen: 3. 15) As futanarian, women are the ‘foot’ race, while the iambic foot, as the basic unit of written language, distinguishing the works of writers from each other’s, isn’t a clue to plagiarism, if the time travel hypothesis is applied. Works that seem similar are simply alternatives created earlier or later by the creative personality’s many avatars. While the opponent of plagiarism holds that copying is a crime, the proponent of similarity holds that there are alternative personalities, which wouldn’t argue that plagiarism is a crime, and might conceivably be an avatar of the personality of the claimant. However, they would argue that castrating the human race to prevent God’s species of women’s seed from telling the story God wanted is plagiarising the original intention of the Author’s narrative, while the demons of possession accusingly thieve God’s intellectual property by law.
1 Heinlein, Robert A. ‘”- All You Zombies -”’, June 11th, 1958.