The Man Who Folded Himself Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by David Gerrold

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Author Who Folded Me

  IN THE BOX was a belt. And a manuscript.

  Author’s Note

  Afterword

  Copyright Page

  Praise for David Gerrold and The Man Who Folded Himself

  “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

  Also by David Gerrold

  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 World of Star Trek

  The Trouble With Tribbles

  Worlds of Wonder

  *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.

  The Author Who Folded Me

  Robert J. Sawyer

  You 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 Trekthat 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 rei
ssue 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).

  Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles were obviously an influence on David; his tribbles are clearly a loving homage to the Martian flatcats from The Rolling Stones. So it’s no surprise that he has written some superior juveniles of his own, most recently the trilogy Jumping off the Planet (2000), Bouncing off the Moon (2001), and Leaping to the Stars (2002).

  David finally got his long-overdue Hugo and Nebula Awards, for his autobiogra phical 1994 novelette “The Martian Child” (a novel version was published in 2002). And I do mean long overdue: he started garnering Hugo and Nebula nominations with his very first works, but the actual prizes eluded him for decades. Indeed, The Man Who Folded Himself was nominated for both the Hugo (SF’s People’s Choice award) and the Nebula (the field’s Academy Award for Best Novel of 1973)—but it lost both awards to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

  Now, Rama is a fine book, and it may have deserved the Hugo—but David should have got the Nebula. See, the Hugo is for the fan favorite of the year, and Rama, Clarke’s first novel since 2001: A Space Odyssey, certainly was that. But the Nebula is a peer award, given by writers to writers; it’s us tipping our hats to one of our own, acknowledging a work that pushed the envelope, that improved the field, that represented the best damned thing any of us had done in the past year.

  Rendezvous with Rama was a lot of fun, but it was hardly groundbreaking (indeed, in its steadfast refusal to have any sort of characterization, it was a throwback to the hard SF of a quartercentury earlier). But The Man Who Folded Himself did change things. Not only was it the first truly original time-travel novel since H. G. Wells invented the subgenre back in 1895, but it’s also quite innovative in structure (go back when you’ve finished reading it and count the number of characters that appear in the book).

  Moreover, The Man Who Folded Himself is rigorous in its extrapolation and absolutely unflinching in its characterization—the book is brutally frank about sex and narcissism, and deeply explores questions of sexual orientation. As it happens, David himself is gay, but his heterosexual love scenes—here, and in When HARLIE Was One and the Chtorr book A Season for Slaughter—are among the best in the genre. Just goes to show you what a good writer he is.

  Re-reading this book, knowing all the things I know about David now that I didn’t when I first encountered it—that he’s a tireless fundraiser for the AIDS Project Los Angeles; that for all his counterculture Californian youth, he’s a fiercely proud American; that he’s a single dad to a wonderful (and now grown) adopted son—I see the pain and honesty and truth that he wrung out of his very soul and put into The Man Who Folded Himself.

  You’ll see it, too. All you have to do is turn the page.

  Robert J. Sawyer won the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1995 (for The Terminal Experiment). His latest novel is Humans , the second volume of his “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy from Tor. Visit his website at SFwriter.com.

  IN THE BOX was a belt. And a manuscript.

  I hadn’t seen Uncle Jim in months.

  He looked terrible. Shrunken. His skin hung in wrinkled folds, his complexion was gray, and he was thin and stooped. He seemed to have aged ten years. Twenty. The last time I’d seen him, we were almost the same height. Now I realized I was taller.

  “Uncle Jim!” I said. “Are you all right?”

  He shook off my arm. “I’m fine, Danny. Just a little tired, that’s all.” He came into my apartment. His gait was no longer a stride, now just a shuffle. He lowered himself to the couch with a sigh.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t have that much time. We have some important business to take care of. How old are you, boy?” He peered at me carefully.

  “Huh—? I’m twenty-one. You know that.”

  “Ah.” He seemed to find that satisfactory. “Good. I was afraid I was too early, you looked so young—” He stopped himself. “How are you doing in school?”

  “Fine.” I said it noncommittally. The university was a bore, but Uncle Jim was paying me to attend. An apartment, a car, and a thousand a week for keeping my nose clean.

  “You don’t like it though, do you?”

  I said, “No, I don’t.” Why try to tell him I did? He’d know it for the lie it was.

  “You want to drop out?”

  I shrugged. “I could live without it.”

  “Yes, you could,” he agreed. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but stopped himself instead. “I won’t give you the lecture on the value of an education. You’ll find it out for yourself in time. And besides, there are other ways to learn.” He coughed; his whole chest rattled. He was so thin. “Do you know how much you’re worth right now?”

  “No. How much?”

  He pursed his lips thoughtfully; the wrinkled skin folded and unfolded. “One hundred and forty-three million dollars.”

  I whistled. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s been properly handled.”

  One hundred and forty-three million dollars—!

  “Where is it now?” I asked. Stupid question.

  “In stocks, bonds, properties. Things like that.”

  “I can’t touch it then, can I?

  He looked at me and smiled. “I keep forgetting, Danny, How impatient you were—are.” He corrected himself, then looked across at me; his gaze wavered slightly. “You don’t need it right now, do you?

  I thought about it. One hundred and forty-three million dollars. Even if they delivered it in fifties, the apartment wasn’t that big. “No, I guess not.”

  “Then we’ll leave it where it is,” he said. “But it’s your money. If you need it, you can have it.”

  One hundred and forty-three million dollars. What would I do with it—what couldn’t I do with it? I had known my parents had left me a little money, but—

  One hundred and forty-three million—!

  I was having trouble swallowing.

  “I thought it was in trust until I was twenty-five,” I said.

  “No,” he corrected. “It’s for me to administer for you until you’re ready for it. You can have it any time you want.”

  “I’m not so sure I want it,” I said slowly. “No—I mean, of course, I want it! It’s just that—” How to explain? I had visions of myself trapped in a big mansion surrounded by butlers and bodyguards whose sole duty was to make sure that I dusted the stacks of bills every morning. One hundred and forty-three million dollars. Even in hundreds, it would fill several closets. “I’m doing okay—” I started to say, then stopped. I didn’t know what to say.

  Uncle Jim frowned. “Yes, I keep forgetting. There’s been so much—Danny, I’m going to increase your allowance by an extra thousand dollars a week, but I want you to do something to earn it.”

  “Sure,” I said, delighted in spite of myself. This was a sum of money I could understand. “What do I have to do?”

  “Keep a diary.”

  “A diary?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean write things down in a black book every day? Dear diary, today I kissed a girl, that kind of stuff?”

  “Not exactly. I want you to record the things that seem important to you. Type out a few pages every day, that’s all. You can record specific incidents or just make general comments about anything worth recording. All I want is your guarantee that you’ll add something to it every day—or let’s say a
t least once a week. I know how you get careless sometimes.”

  “And you want to read it—?” I started to ask.

  “Oh, no, no, no—” he said hastily. “I just want to know that you’re keeping it up. You won’t have to show it to me. Or anyone. It’s your diary. What you do with it or make of it is up to you.”

  My mind was already working—an extra thousand dollars a week. “Can I dictate it and have someone type it up for me?”

  He shook his head. “It has to be a personal diary, Danny. That’s the whole purpose of it. If it has to pass through someone else’s hands, you might be inhibited. I want you to be honest.” He straightened up where he sat, and for a moment he looked like the Uncle Jim I remembered, tall and strong. “Don’t play any games, Danny. Be truthful in your diary. If you’re not, you’ll only cheat yourself. And put down everything—everything that seems important to you.”

  “Everything,” I repeated dumbly.

  He nodded. There was a lot of meaning in that word.

  “All right,” I said. “But why?”

  “‘Why?’” He looked at me. “You’ll find out when you write it.” As usual, he was right.

  I’m not fooled. Uncle Jim is trying to teach me something. This isn’t the first time he’s thrown me into the deep end of the pool.

  Okay, this is it. At least this is today’s answer:

  There’s a point beyond which money is redundant.

  This is not something I discovered just this week.