This is a novel that may be exhilarate and disturb. For
some, it may disgust. For others, they may see precursors as having covered
this before, but the novel’s target audience will be those who delight in the bizarre
“sexcapades” and time paradoxes. If you are only into the latter, read the first
half and the ending.
Imagine expanding the world’s greatest time-travel story (Robert
A. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”) to novel length. It might look something like David
Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself.
There are differences, which I’ll discuss below. If you haven’t read Heinlein’s
story, do so.
In Gerrold’s novel, Danny, our narrator, has inherited what
he believes to be 143 million dollars since his Uncle Jim had suggested as much.
So Danny is living off the fat of the land. Except it turns out, after Uncle Jim dies, that he has been living on the last of the fortune. All
that is left is a belt.
The belt, though, is a time machine, which allows him to
change his life.
Discussion (Spoilers Galore)
Some argue this novel should have won the major awards. The
winner, Rendezvous with Rama, seems
to be controversial—a mysterious, alien ship floats through space with little characterization—but
others have argued for completely different novels (Lethem in favor of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), so perhaps that is why
Clarke's novel won. Other reasons may exist.
It’s similarity to Heinlein’s work may have marred the work
in some eyes, but it takes different narrative, tonal, and philosophical paths. The
narrative changes (the time skip, the expansion into the sexual nature) aren’t
especially significant in terms of meaning but the other two are.
In the sixties, sex seemed to have lost its taboo
nature. A lot of books tried to exploit and
explore the new boundaries of decency when court cases like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl won. Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, mined this vein. It is into this atmosphere the
novel is released.
Danny and his future self go to the races and bet on horses.
They win handsomely, knowing the outcome of events. They invest and become
rich. But at some point (midway into the novel), Danny is warned by one future
self that another future self will seduce him because being himself, the future
selves understands his needs better than anyone.
Now the narrative is somewhat sly. The events may or may not have or will have
happened. He is, after all, reading the diary of a future self, and he may or
may not choose to fulfill these things, which is an intriguing concept in
itself. It prevents the protagonist from actually committing acts he may but hasn’t
yet committed.
Another interesting aspect is the textual assumption that one
will be attracted to one’s self. Narcissism is usually a metaphorical abstraction,
but here it’s literal—a physical reality. But not everyone is attracted to
himself. So the text for those, will at best be strange, foreign angle, much as
the text justifies itself.
A third aspect that differentiates this and makes it stand
out is its tonal difference from Heinlein’s story. In Heinlein, the narrative is
as epic and inescapable as Oedipus Rex.
But here, flux and uncertainty about the future is the name of the game. What’s
interesting about this is the narrator’s attempts to avoid this flux by
remaining near his “home time” or his era since other eras become too foreign
the further away he is from what he knows. Also, just as he maintains the
livelihood of his own future, he tries to keep the present past aligned with
his own memory of events since that might change his present.
The narrator is preoccupied with his own inevitable death,
his failure at love outside himself (or even with himself) and this maintaining
of his present. These and speculative inventions like the Time Skim (although not
fully utilized) sets this tale at least a little distance from Heinlein’s.
It's a little surprising that this and Heinlein's story haven't been named for a Retro-Tiptree award.
