The Man Who Folded Himself. David Gerrold

      

      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 then-new 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,