—All You Zombies—, by Robert Heinlein
This story is from Robert Heinlein, celebrated science fiction author of the twentieth century. —All You Zombies— concerns not the undead but rather time travel, especially time paradoxes. It can take two or three readings to fully understand, like any great time travel narrative (see, for another example, the excellent, and wildly confusing, independent time travel movie Primer), so if you end up listening to the story and not getting it at all, I certainly recommend you check out the text for yourself. Few stories tackle the time paradox in such a fun and intriguing way.
Notes:
I think the guitar music throughout is a little too upbeat for the tone of the story, (and too loud—I never really mastered the proper levels for putting music under speech properly; also, this is certainly one of the stories where music interferes more than anything else) but whatever, at least it's kind of engaging.
I'm clearly uncomfortable speaking into a microphone without a script, but was also apparently too lazy to get around that by actually writing out my intro, at least for this one.
I'm pretty sure there's a less torturous way of pronouncing "ouroboros," but I probably didn't practice beforehand.
I think my favorite part of the story is the "By-Laws of Time" at the end. Aside from that, I still haven't figured out what's going on at the very end of the story, in particular what the story's title is referring to. Still, the ending's got a wistful beauty to it that I like a great deal, and I think it's one of the few places this episode really succeeds.
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