The Man Who Folded Himself

"I think it does! David Gerrold is probably most well-known for writing the Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” which is a classic, incredibly silly, episode from the original Star Trek , where suddenly a bunch of tiny, fluffy, squeaky balls start reproducing like bunnies on the Enterprise. He wrote that when he was, I think, 18 – or, he was very young – and it was his first sale. He went on to do a lot more science fiction that was silly, but with an underlying story about sexuality at the same time. The Man Who Folded Himself came out around the same time as The Female Man . It’s about a guy who discovers that his family has this device, a belt that allows you to travel through time, and his uncle has been basically using it to play the stock market. He passes it on to the main character and is like, ‘Here, do this to get rich,’ basically. So from the outset you know that these are not characters who are going to be trying to ‘preserve the timeline,’ the way a classic time traveller does. They’re like, ‘Nope, we’re here to get rich and have fun!’ “It’s less teaching people about how science works, and more teaching people how history works” So he goes around doing that. But mostly what he does is meet versions of himself. He keeps re-encountering himself for a variety of reasons, and at a certain point there are so many versions of himself travelling around and crossing paths that they all buy a giant luxury timeshare together. There are hundreds of them. And they have giant orgies. He meets a female version of himself, but he also has a lot of gay orgies with himself in this book, which I find delightful, because it’s the kind of time travel thought experiment that we’ve all imagined, but David Gerrold went there! He was like: ‘Yeah, of course I want to have sex with 1000 versions of myself.’ He was openly gay at a time when being openly gay in Hollywood and in the publishing industry was a lot harder than it is now. And he just leaned into it. He was like: ‘This is what it’s all about! Gay time travel!” I think there’s probably something inherently queer about time travel. Joanna Russ would probably agree with me. David Gerrold is the master of this. This book reminds me a lot of Back to the Future in terms of tone. It’s very light. There’s no horrible threat, no childhood trauma. Just, ‘hey man, it’s the seventies, let’s get high.’ It’s delightful. It’s a bit of a time capsule, but at the same time, no one else has written that story since – you know, fun gay orgies with yourself. So I hope we can bring back the happy gay time travel story. Sure. As an author of a time travel book, I was not interested in paradoxes. I’m just not personally invested in the paradox structure. But it is, of course, incredibly important to the genre – you know, the idea that you could go back in time and change your own history. That leads to a number of different paradoxes. Could you become your own grandfather? Or does your dad always have to go back in time to impregnate your mom? These kinds of questions fit neatly into the idea of “preserving the timeline,” or keeping history exactly as it was. And that’s a really easy plot device: we have to preserve the timeline to avoid the paradox. So you can see why people get into it, and why it’s a fun mental exercise. But if you play out the paradox, plot-wise, you see that the only endgame is going to be: ‘okay, then we have to make sure everything happens in exactly the same way it has already happened.’ I’m sure there are exceptions, but I think this plot device lends itself to a conservative bent in time travel stories. You can’t change history, only preserve it, no matter how terrible it was. Because if you don’t, you won’t be born. Or, your country won’t be founded. Something like that. Trying to preserve the past is the time travel equivalent of saying “Make America great again.” Don’t change the past, and don’t change the present. Alternatively, you could toss the paradox thing out and say: “Screw it. We’re going to change the past.” I think that’s the more interesting and radical approach. But I must confess that one of my very favourite time travel novels is all about the paradox."