Book Review: The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold

 

 The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published January, 1974 by Popular Library

Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1974), 

Nebula Award Nominee for Novel (1973), 

Locus Award Nominee for Best SF Novel (1974)

I knew this was a weird science fiction classic, and that it was considered one of the best time travel novels ever written. Somewhere along the way someone suggested to me that it was best read in one sitting. So, I saved this short novel for a train trip to LA. Where Gerrold is from, where the novel starts. I read it all in one sitting on my way to the very educational Speculative Fiction Through Media conference in LA.

Let's get this right out of the way. I complain all the time about first-person narrative. I generally don’t like it because authors often cheat. The novel that is supposed to be told by the narrator starts to read like a novel, has descriptions and flourishes that are unnatural or goes outside the POV and it takes me out of the book. Reminds me there is an author making bad choices. It is the same reason I don’t like found footage movies that always cheat, like cameras accidently left rolling in rooms where a personal conversation is being held.  Most first-person novels would be better if they were in third person. Just my opinion. Most authors can’t help themselves and cheat and write in ways that take me out of the natural narration. (Note: there is an argument that the whole book is actually second person, but alas)

I do enjoy when a novel is in first person for the right reasons that make story sense. TMWFH is a narrative told in first person, and it has to be. I have always used Delores Calirborne as an example of this style done right. It is told in the form of an interrogation interview, and Stephen King never cheats, it is written just as that character would have spoke. I would also add Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House and now this novel that fits as first person that never cheats.

TMWFH never ever cheats, and while I would say some aspects of the end are not in the least bit surprising, seeing it coming doesn’t take away from the power. There are plenty of mind-bending twists along the way. If you can read this on a long flight or a long train trip as I did you will be rewarded with a better experience. I think this is a masterpiece so if you trust me, well here is your spoiler warning as I want to break down this novel.

Reading all at once makes it more of a singular experience and because of the twists of the story it works even better that way flowing as a time travel cosmic space-time fever dream. The story of college student Daniel Eakins who has never wanted for anything because his rich Uncle Jim always gave him money. When his Uncle dies he tells him he is worth millions of dollars when Jim is gone there is no money just a box with a belt. 

The belt you see is a time machine, a time belt.  Once Daniel has the time belt he begins looping through time. “I staggered and straightened. I had forgotten about that. The instructions had warned that there would be a slight shock every time I jumped. It had something to do with forcing the air out of the space you were materializing in. It wasn't bad though I just hadn't been expecting it. It was like scuffing your shoes on a rug and then touching metal, that kind of shock, but all over your whole body at once.”

 

First, he just goes one day into the future, makes a few bets and hangs out with himself. As the time travel escalates so does the novel. “This done, the new one, the one who had given me the newspaper - where had he come from? The future obviously, but which future? His world was one that no longer existed - no, never would exist. We were leaving the races without taking the track for a million and a half dollars.”

In many ways this novel is a thought experiment seen through the eyes of a character who not only travels through time but this story is an early experimentation with the ideas of many worlds theories.  “Every change you make is cumulative; It goes on top of every other change you've made, and every change you add later will go on top of that. You can go back in time and talk yourself out of winning a million and a half dollars, but the resultant world is not the one where you didn't win a million and a half dollars; it's a world where you talked yourself out of it. See the difference?”

It gets weird, Daniel eventually is creating many universes with his travels and ends up at poker games made up of multiple versions of himself,  and hanging by the pool at retreats in a giant mansion he owns populated by a dozens of various versions of himself at different ages and experiences. Early in his time travel experience Daniel feels isolated as the only person who can understand his experience, that is why the many versions of himself flock together and eventually that need for companionship takes the novel into its weirdest moments, yes it gets weirder.

Daniel enters into a sexual relationship with the only person who understands him, a person he wants to share pleasure with. Is love or lust but certain versions of Daniel start to feel love and attraction for other versions of himself. That is the point where the novel makes you blink and think to yourself. Are we really doing this David Gerrold?

He does after thousands of trips to various universes to find Diane, she is him, but born a woman, she also has a timebelt, her universe is not that different, eventually we learn that Daniel and Diane have to travel with the time belt and try multiple time to make sure she is born and sent into a past where she can find him. This novel is cycles upon cycles as any story freed from the straight line we experience of time.  Daniel wanting to manipulate the time stream to change the child from being girl to boy leads to some scary moments.

Daniel also sees history; a 2003 edition got meta by changing part of this scene to include the fall of the world trade center towers despite still starting in 1975.

“I've been to the year 2001. I've been to the moon. I've walked its surface in a flimsy spacesuit and held its dust in my hands. I've seen the earth rise above the Lunar Apennines.

I visited Tranquility Base in flashing back to the past I watched the eagle land I saw Neil Armstrong come ashore. And more I've been to Mars. I've been to the great hotels that orbit Jupiter, and I've seen the rings of Saturn.

 I've time skimmed from the far past to the far future.

I have seen creation.

And I have seen entropy period from great bang to great saying the existence of the earth is less than a blank; The death of the sun by Nova almost unnoticeable.

I've seen the future of mankind”

While some of these grand statements about history are cool they are not the point. It just an expression of how long and how much Daniel has been traveling, it is flavor for the story. One of my favorite moments of this type…

“Today president Robert F Kennedy announced that in response to recent discoveries, the United states is initiating a high priority research program to investigate the possibilities of travel through time.”

So in order to protect my one man monopoly, I had to go back and unkill SirHan SirHan.”

I have no idea if Philip K. Dick read this novel, it seems up his alley. Another scene that involved these fantastic time trips reminded me of a novel Philip K. Dick outlined in 1980 but never ended up writing.  “Once I created a world where Jesus Christ never existed. He went out into the desert to fast and he never came back. The 20th century I returned to was different.

Alien.

The languages were different, the clothing styles, the maps, everything. The cities were smaller; The buildings were shorter and the streets were narrower there were fewer cars and they seemed ugly and inefficient.

I could have been on another planet. The culture was incomprehensible.”

An average time travel story would be about these trips, but it is not the experiment David Gerrold is interested in. 

The experiment is 99% of the novel is populated by Daniel, every character except the financial advisor early in the book is one of the versions of Daniel, and even when alternate versions go by Diane or Don, they all spring from the original Daniel. Now astute SF readers might think the origin of this story sounds similar to the Heinlein classic story “All Ye Zombies” made even more famous by the movie Predestination starring Ethan Hawke. Sure they are spins on predestination and paradoxes, both are great but I have to go with Gerrold doing the superior take. It might be similar to the horror scene debating The Stand vs. Swan Song.

It is not shocking, anyone paying close attention to the details will suspect from early on that Daniel’s Uncle Jim is his already self, that he infact is his own father, and his mother is an alternate version of himself. They he had returned to the 1950s to raise himself and make sure he gets the Timebelt.

“I am the baseline.”

I am the Danny from which all other Denny's will spring.

I am a circle, complete unto itself. I have brought life into this world, and that life is me.

And from this circle will spring an infinite number of tangents. All other dannies who have ever been and will ever be.”

The Man Who Folded Himself is a masterpiece of time travel fiction, I am not sure if Gerrold who is Sci-fi realist would consider this surreal, bizarro or abstract. It is a masterpiece, an interlocking tale of multiple universes. It is a must read novel. It lost the 1974 Hugo award to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama a book I don’t think deserves the big prize. I think giving the Hugo award to an experimental time loop novel with one character who is every single person in a novel and is both his father and mother might be too much for the voters at the time. I think it is masterpiece.