Heinlein's 'All You Zombies' Now a Sci-Fi Movie Head Trip

HughPickens.com writes: Sara Stewart reports at the NY Post that the new sci-fi movie Predestination, opening January 9, is "loopier than Spielberg's [Minority Report]; its plot twists and turns 'like a snake eating its tail,' one character remarks, until you're not sure whether its developments are even plausible in a fictional universe." It's based on Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction classic All You Zombies, first published in 1959. The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel, further developing themes explored by Heinlein in a previous work, By His Bootstraps, published some 18 years earlier. Predestination's plot concerns the intersection of a time-traveling assassin and an androgynous young writer

Comments

Re:Odd choices of Heinlein stories to make into mo

[gurps_npc]

True. I would Love to see "Stranger in a Strange land", "I will fear no Evil", or "Friday" turned into a movie

Re:Intersex and time travel

[BarbaraHudson]

Loved that story (and not for the obvious reasons). Heinlein tackled themes decades before they were mainstream, never mind acceptable. I guess that's one of the reasons his stories stand the test of time.

Re:Odd choices of Heinlein stories to make into mo

[freeze128]

For a Heinlein time travel story, I prefer "The Door into Summer". It's not nearly as complicated as "Zombies", but it fits together well.

Perpendoxes, not paradoxes.

[Dr. Manhattan]

If the movie follows the story, there actually aren't any paradoxes. Instead, there are stable time loops (once called 'perpendoxes' because they are 'orthogonal to paradoxes'). Such loops don't contradict themselves like a paradox does. Killing your grandfather so you don't ever have existed, so you couldn't have killed him - that's a paradox. Becoming your own grandfather is a stable time loop.

(Yes, I've thought about this too much.)