The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold

The sturdy walls of the Golden Age of Science Fiction were crumbling by the late 1960s. It started a decade beforehand, with groundbreaking writers like Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Philip Jose Farmer. By the time the counterculture had its way with the genre, it was virtually unrecognizable.

The new breed of writer wasn't so much interested in outer space exploration. The inner-workings of the human psyche were plumbed. Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad. Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, and others didn't merely shake the foundations of SF, they bulldozed it beyond all recognition.

Then hippies started getting into the game. Spider Robinson, George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, Terry Carr. The author photos looked like they belonged on the jackets of rock albums.

This was the New Wave of Science Fiction, which was chronicled in Ellison's landmark Dangerous Visions anthologies. Authors were talking about feminism, the drug culture, sexuality, and racial equality. Pretty radical, but I don't think a lot of people credit the genre for social advances of the time.

I knew of David Gerrold. He is known by most as the writer of the second most popular Star Trek episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles". I lumped him in with those writers, which was silly of me. After all, Star Trek employed writers like Norman Spinrad, Robert Bloch, Fredric Brown, and Harlan Ellison. Ellison's working relationship with Roddenberry was predictably explosive.

Gerrold also wrote tie-in books. I believe the only thing I read by him was his novelization of Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Other than that, I didn't give him much thought.

I recently acquired a large lot of old SF books, and some Gerrold titles were included. Over the years I heard this and that about The Man Who Folded Himself. It is considered one of the best and most important time travel novels. I decided to give it a try.

Whoa, dude, this book is some heavy shit. Published in '73, The Man Who Folded Himself falls right into the realm of mind-blowing hippie fiction. The main character does dope and even has gay relations. That sort of thing was unthinkable a decade or even less prior to 1973.

Gerrold refers to people buying a "lid". I don't think many older fans knew what he meant. Nor do I think younger ones will either. I haven't heard weed described as a lid since the heyday of Cheech and Chong.

Don't bother with scientific explanations in The Man Who Folded Himself. That sort of thing was for nerds. The protagonist, Daniel Eakins, discovers a belt that allows him to travel through time. The clincher is, each time he takes a trip, another version of himself s created.

Soon he is surrounded by various incarnations of Daniel Eakins. He has sex with male and female manifestations of himself. It gets pretty confusing, and I had the idea he is his own parents. Or perhaps even God.

Gender fluidity had been explored in other SF books. Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil came out three years before The Man Who Folded Himself. Jean Marie Stine's Season of the Witch was written in 1968, and was originally credited to Hank Stine. Joanna Russ published The Female Man in 1970. Despite that, Gerrold was still well ahead of the curve in dealing with the subject in a mature fashion.

The Man Who Folded Himself is short on character and long on ideas, but it's a good book. I won't call it a favorite, and I will almost certainly never read it again. It is, however, a vital stepping stone in the evolution of the science fiction genre.

Written by Mark Sieber