BECAUSE THERE ISN’T REALLY A REASON FOR IT TO EXIST, I’m not updating the Booklog (“stuff I’ve said about stuff I’ve read”) site anymore–I’ll just give you book reviews over on the main blog here. Old reviews are still there. Here’s the first of two reviews of books I read while in England.

I read David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself because it was described (by National Review’s John Derbyshire, I think) as “getting time travel right.” I didn’t expend the effort needed to verify that statement–the logical puzzles involved in time travel make my brain hurt–but certainly from a casual, vacation-type reading Derbyshire’s praise seemed warranted. The book was lots of fun most of the time, a bizarre workout for the brain, a suggestive look at what one man does when he becomes the only person he knows who can travel in four dimensions.

But the narrator, the time traveler, was a truly disturbing character. It was difficult to tell whether Gerrold was aware of just how disturbing this guy really was (not that the author’s obliviousness would make the book worse, necessarily). The narrator is lonely, alienated from others, and he becomes progressively more self-centered as he travels through time. Instead of folding himself, he seems more to collapse in on himself. There are some parts of the book where the damage caused by this self-centeredness is made explicit, but there is simply no alternative presented–there are virtually no characters except for different time-slices and “versions” of the narrator, and selfishness or the pursuit of personal happiness/pleasure is the only value system ever discussed or acted on in the novel. So you get the impression that although an excess of self-involvement is ultimately harmful, taking one’s own pleasure as the standard of value is A-OK as long as you’re careful–yes, you’ll have regrets (the sections of the book dealing with the nature of irrevocable acts are really good), but basically selfishness is the way to go. The novel begins to feel claustrophobic, and ultimately pretty hopeless, which I don’t think was the author’s intention. (Could definitely be wrong here.) It’s a quick and exciting read, and I recommend it to any sci-fi or time-travel fans, but in the end TMWFH feels like a parable about anti-eroticism, fear of difference, and personal collapse.