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.

THE TIDE KING, immortality in an herb...take it or not?

THE TIDE KING
JEN MICHALSKI
Black Lawrence Press
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Stanley Polensky and Calvin Johnson serve in Germany during World War II. Calvin, near death after being shelled, is given a bewitched herb by Stanley but then left for dead. Each soldier returns from the war and years pass. Calvin, discovering that he cannot age and cannot die, searches for Stanley to get answers.

Michalski's The Tide King is the story of burnette saxifrage, an herb rumored in Polish folklore to provide those who eat it with immortality, and its effects on three generations of a Polish family over two continents beginning in 19th-century Poland and ending in 1976 America.

But it is also the story of young men’s sacrifice during great wars, of a young child's experiences during the holocaust and being a war orphan, of the curiosities of the American century, such as 1950s country music and smoke jumpers in the Montana mountains and 1970s New York. Just as Viking king Cnut, who was rumored to be so powerful that he controlled the tides at his feet, discovered “how empty and worthless is the power of kings,” Calvin Johnson and others cursed by the herb find in The Tide King that the power of youth and immortality is an empty gift, for they will continually witness the death of their families, lovers, dreams, and ideals.

My Review: Magic, real magic, carries a price that must be paid, and requires a coldness of spirit that can't be faked. Amateurs cannot fathom the horrors they unleash by assuming that magic fixes things, makes things better, creates rather than destroys.

Jen Michalski knows this. She writes her fable of eternal youth and perpetual healing as the painful, costly thing it is. Michalski offers this modern take on The Picture of Dorian Gray as a parable of kind intentions gone metastatic. Stanley Polensky means well when he curses the dying Calvin Johnson with eternal youth. Calvin Johnson means well when he offers his "gift" to the one woman he's ever loved, as she is old and dying. Heidi Polensky, daughter of a mother who wanted nothing to do with her and a father who didn't sire her, means well when she curses herself with eternal youth to keep her one true love, Calvin, company.

And none of these good intentions have the slightest effect on the painful reality: Control is an illusion, and control of death is fraught with so much unknowable baggage as to be a terrifying power to be devoutly avoided.

Michalski, much published and well versed in the narrative arts, gives us a chilling ride through the blasted emotional landscape of life's losers. Stanley and Heidi are the people one sees walking to the bus stop, hunched and defeated, going...well, I've never known where they're going, can such sad faces actually have jobs, or families, or lives? Surely they're actors, characters...but here they're alive, and yes they're as sad and defeated as their faces. But they're also human beings longing for more, and tragically, they get it.

Like characters from myths, the Polenskys haven't learned what to hope for, wish for, or how to use a gift (sparingly and after much thought!), because no one anywhere ever has believed they could have a gift at all. But Calvin, the recipient twice over of the Polensky's gifts, is possibly more to be pitied than even they are. A golden boy who will eternally be a boy, grows into an angry and desperate man, choosing dangerous and difficult things to do with his unearned life, and "succeeding" at every turn.

But alone. Always, forever, beautiful and accomplished and alone. It is so unspeakably frightening to imagine being beautiful and isolated by a secret no one could possibly dream is true....

Had the novel focused on these three characters, and spent its time exploring their realities, I'd give it my highest recommendation in spite of copyediting problems ("$230 dollars" is one tooth-gritting example). But the introduction of a magical elder, Ela, and her Holocaustic childhood plus the portentous attempt to draw the herbal curse from a misty past, falls very flat for this reader. The ending, a journey undertaken to fix that which the characters' "gifts" have broken, is a hollow clanging hatch being shut on a well of wonderful ideas.

The very real pleasures of Jen Michalski's writing are enough to make the novel well worthy of your book-buying dollars. It makes me feel sad that I can't be passionately warbling paeans of encouragement to you. But I am sure that, if you buy the book, you will spend pleasurable hours savoring its mellow, lovely prose. And that's enough to make it worth you while.