The Man Who Folded Himself

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“superb”

—THE INDEPENDENT (LONDON)

 

 

“David Gerrold proves that he can do all the things that made us love Heinlein's storytelling—and often better.”

—ORSON SCOTT CARD

 

 

“This is all widely imaginative and mindbending . . . Gerrold is such a good writer that he keeps us reading through . . . shifts of time, space and character—right into pre-history . . . After reading this one, time-machine addicts will never quite be able to look at the gadget again as a simple plaything.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

 

 

“a major talent”

—BOOKLIST

 

 

“lively, inventive and entertaining”

—MAGILL'S GUIDE TO SCIENCE
FICTION AND FANTASY LITERATURE

 

 

“This would be good science fiction by any standards; in the present company it is outstanding. A nineteen-year-old student is bequeathed a belt which enables him to travel in time, which is hardly a new idea. What makes this book different is that it relentlessly follows through the implications of time travel, each one of which would normally satisfy an SF author as the germ for an entire novel.

“As the narrator jumps ahead of himself, so he keeps having to go back to erase awkward details of his alternative lives. From early on in the story he has to learn, literally, to live with himself—sometimes there are as many as half-a-dozen versions of himself at different ages in the same room . . . the whole thing has an uncanny allegorical force and underneath the diverting brilliance there begins to emerge, gratuitously, a genuine philosophic melancholy . . . Altogether most impressive.”

—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

 

 

“a first-rate writer”

—LIBRARY JOURNAL

 

 

“the inspiration behind
The Man Who Folded Himself
is Heinlein . . . [Gerrold demonstrates] skill in maintaining the verisimilitude of time travel through plausible and at times inspired inventive touchstones”

—DONALD L. LAWLER,
Science Fiction Writers

FICTION

The Star Wolf Series*
The Voyage of the Star Wolf
The Middle of Nowhere
Blood and Fire
(January 2004)

 

The Flying Sorcerers
(with Larry Niven)
When HARLIE Was One
Moonstar Odyssey
The Martian Child

 

The War Against the Chtorr Series

 

The Dingilliad trilogy

 

 

NONFICTION

 

*The legendary Star Wolf Series is being published in 2003 by BenBella Books, including the never-before-published Star Wolf novel
Blood and Fire.

Win a free, autographed, pre-publication copy of
Blood and Fire
at
www.benbellabooks.com

This book is for Larry Niven, a good friend who believes that time travel is impossible.

He's probably right.

 

 

 

 

Y
ou ask most of today's science-fiction writers what author first got them hooked on the genre, and they'll say Asimov, Clarke, or Heinlein.

Not me.

For me, it was David Gerrold.

The very first adult science-fiction novel I ever read was, by coincidence, David's very first solo novel,
Space Skimmer
.

It was the summer of 1972, when I was 12. My dad went to the local bookstore to buy me a couple of books to take to camp. He knew that I liked
Star Trek
reruns, and so he wanted to get me a science-fiction novel—even though he himself didn't read SF. He asked a clerk for recommendations, and was handed
Space Skimmer
—solely because the author had written an episode of
Star Trek
.

I devoured that book, with its Escher spaceships and massive protagonist, and still think very fondly of it—after all, it hooked me on the genre for life.

Two years later, I made my first trip to Bakka, Toronto's thennew science-fiction specialty store, and there I found another Gerrold novel, freshly out in paperback after a successful run in hardcover. The cover painting—then and now—gave me the creeps: a young man's face, eyes wide in horror, creased into neat squares as if it had been folded up, with tiny naked men hanging off the eyelids and lower lip, and cavorting in his hair.

The book, of course, was
The Man Who Folded Himself
—the same novel you're holding in your hands right now. It was new then, and thanks to BenBella, it's new again. The symbolism is almost too perfect: I feel as though I'm wearing Gerrold's timebelt, handing that wonderful, wonderful book back to my younger self. What a delicious paradox it would have been to have seen a copy of this edition back when I was a teenager, with an introduction by me written thirty years later.

The Man Who Folded Himself
makes you think like that: about timelines doubling back, about the future altering the past, about growing up to be who you were meant to be, about destiny.

Of course, I re-read the novel in order to write this introduction. I admire it even more now, as a middle-aged man, than I did as a teenaged boy; I found myself nodding over and over in understanding when elderly characters late in the book kept saying to younger ones, “You're too young.”

Still, re-reading this book was also a bit disconcerting.

Why? Because David Gerrold's fingerprints are all over me. I can see where my own style—short paragraphs, lots of em-dashes, pages of introspection with nothing external happening—came from. It's David's style. I owe him, and this
tour de force
, more than I ever realized.

David Gerrold was born in Chicago in 1944, but he grew up in Southern California. I first got to know him online, in 1990, on the CompuServe science-fiction literature forum, but we didn't actually meet physically until five years later.

(Fan-boy confession: I know the
exact
moment, because, just like Daniel Eakins, the viewpoint character of
The Man Who Folded Himself
, I keep a journal. We met on Friday, August 25, 1995, at a Tor Books party at the World Science Fiction Convention in
Glasgow, Scotland. And although I think I kept a cool outward demeanor, inside I was freaking out; I'd met lots of authors whose books I'd admired before, but this guy standing in front of me had written words that Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock had said!)

David's
Star Trek
connection, by the way, goes much deeper than just the episode the bookstore clerk was alluding to when he handsold
Space Skimmer
to my dad, although there's no doubt that David will always be best known to Trekkers for writing “The Trouble With Tribbles.”

But David also wrote two fascinating nonfiction books about the series, wrote by far the best episode of the animated
Star Trek
(called “Bem”), was an extra in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, and was instrumental in shaping
Star Trek: The Next Generation
(a version of
Trek
that conformed much more to David's insightful analysis of what the show should be, as outlined in his 1973
The World of Star Trek
, than to anything Gene Roddenberry ever articulated).

Reinventing
Star Trek
has occupied a lot of David's career. There's no doubt that his
Star Wolf
novels are his very successful attempt to do just that. But there's also much more to him; indeed, what's astonishing is just how versatile a writer he is.

For instance, David also wrote one of the great novels of artificial intelligence, called
When HARLIE Was One
(1972; a reissue is forthcoming from BenBella). He's also the author of a wonderful action-adventure series—thirty years in the making, and still going strong—collectively known as
The War Against the Chtorr
.

And he was story editor for the first season of
The Land of the Lost
, the most intelligent Saturday-morning science-fiction show ever. It premiered in 1974, boasting scripts by Larry Niven, Ben Bova, Theodore Sturgeon, and, of course, David himself (David's varied TV credits led to him teaching scriptwriting at Pepperdine University for many years).