"The Man Who Folded Himself" David Gerrold

"Think of an artist drawing a picture.  But he's using indelible ink and he doesn't have an eraser.  If he wants to make a change, he has to paint over a line with white.  The line hasn't ceased to exist; it has just been painted over and a new line drawn on top. ... He's aware of all the lines and drawings beneath the final one, the layer upon layer of images, each one not quite the one--all those discarded pieces; they haven't ceased to exist, they've just been painted out of view.  Subjectively, time travel is like that."

I'm always looking at on-line lists of books, award winners, amazon.com listmania, LibraryThing, etc., hoping to find treasures to add to my "to read" shelf.  Last year I saw some lists of essential science fiction classics and bought several, including "Folded."  Of course, he-who-caters-to-my-every-whim read them before I got a chance to, as he usually does. 

What I thought would be a time travel, space cowboy adventure was really a philosophy exploration of self. 

Larry Niven says in the introduction that this was the first truly original time travel book since H. G. Wells' "Time Machine."  I would have thought there would have been others before this book was published in 1972, but in fact none I have read are as original as this book.  The main character (or should I say characters), Dan Eakins, explores the possible paradox of time travel.  He explains the impossibility of paradox by saying there are alternate time streams.  We cannot erase our own existence because if we could prevent our birth or kill our self at a younger age, we have simply created a different time stream in which we weren't born or we died young, however, we would still exists because our body came from another time stream.  The quote above is part of Gerrold's way of describing time travel.

Dan also grapples with his own identity.  He keeps running into alternate versions of himself as he goes back and forth in time.  He finds spending time with his alternates comfortable, and in fact, variations of Dan, both male and female, are the only characters in the book.  He questions how far his relationships with his selves should go, with interesting results and thoughts on sexuality.

The power of time travel comes with responsibility and Dan has to decide whether he acts to make the world a better place or not and does doing so make him a god.

Why didn't I know this book existed in the 70s?  I suspect its openness about sexuality and the philosophical bent made it less mainstream than books by Heinlein, Asimov and Clark.  There isn't much action in this book, and the narrative is difficult to follow at times as Dan becomes Don, Dianne, Danny and Donna at various times.  Thus, another reason the book wasn't as well known.  But I would put this on the must read list for anyone who loves science fiction.