THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF, forty-seven years old and still speaking to the essence of selfhood

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF
DAVID GERROLD
BenBella Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: This classic work of science fiction is widely considered to be the ultimate time-travel novel. When Daniel Eakins inherits a time machine, he soon realizes that he has enormous power to shape the course of history. He can foil terrorists, prevent assassinations, or just make some fast money at the racetrack. And if he doesn't like the results of the change, he can simply go back in time and talk himself out of making it! But Dan soon finds that there are limits to his powers and forces beyond his control.

My Review: Danny's been livin' the high life, thanks to a bequest from his mysterious old uncle. One day, the gravy train ends, and Danny has to make his own way. With a belt. A very special time-travel-enabling belt.

An exploration of adolescent exceptionalism, a meditation on the establishment, building, and defense of identity, and an astonishingly rare representation of gay maleness in science fiction. The author, who penned "The Trouble with Tribbles" for the original Star Trek series, tackles all this heaviness in less than 200pp, and never makes it feel like any tackling is being done.

Deft and timely even now, Gerrold's unapologetically gay Danny is mildly surprising even in the modern SFnal world. The ewww-ick-they-do-WHAT? homophobes need fear nothing, there's no raunch in Danny's journey of self-discovery (of a sort I've never seen again).

For my teenaged self, this book blew into my life at a time when I was under emotional siege from the forces of Jesus. It was a lifeline thrown from a grown person to my too-young-to-run self. If he could write this book, there was a world that didn't loathe me, because here was something written, published, and sold with me in it! I endured many a screaming, hectoring, sermonizing hour thinking that thought.

If you suspect some youth of your acquaintance might be struggling to think positively of himself because he's probably gay, think about giving him this book. It can't hurt, and it might do him a world of good.

ETA a few musings and a quote. In going back over the 2003 edition of this book, I thought to compare it to the 1973 edition that blew my mind wide open when first read (I was not going to sleep a peaceful night until I found a room full of men having sex with each other and diving in). Gerrold has done a light but thoroughgoing job of making alterations to the book that reflect thirty years' growth in himself and the world. It was lovely to see, and BenBella Books deserves our thanks for making room in this timeline for it to happen.

I've pushed my rating to five stars because, thinking back on it, any minor quibbles I've made vanish in the arc-light of this novel's originality in a musty, stuffy, conservative genre. And world.

I've said in other reviews (see my review, then compare to Received Opinion about Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) that re-reads of the peak experiences of bygone days are hazardous to one's ego. I've always praised Gerrold's book as a well-written, risk-taking, genre-expanding chef d'oeuvre by a writer whose fame came early. I was right then, I'm right now...this book's genre-bending continues because, despite the presence of many other QUILTBAG characters in current SF/F, the main character of this book remains unique and speaks with an evergreen honesty. The frame has been dusted and re-gilded to keep the portrait sharply focused. It takes nothing away from the central and beautiful idea of the book, the inner life of an infinity of people contained in one-many-same-different body-brain-spirit.

I worked and worked to make that sentence make sense and I think I was only marginally successful, but I don't know how to make it better. If I figure it out, I will change it.
^^^
That there's a better review of this book than any I could have dreamed up before.

And that quote:

My body has not experienced its years in sequence. But it has experienced years. And it has aged.
And my mind has been carried headlong with it—this lump of flesh travels through time its own way, in a way that no man has the power to change. ... Perhaps I'm not a mind at all. Perhaps I'm only a body pretending the vanity of being something more. Perhaps it's only the fact that language, which allows me to manipulate symbols, ideas, and concepts, also proves the awareness of self that precedes the inevitable analysis. ... I have spent a lifetime analyzing my life. Living it. And rewriting it to suit me.