A Time of Changes
by Robert Silverberg
Summary
On the colony world Borthan the founding settlers left a document called the Covenant, and its central prohibition is grammatical. A person does not say I. To use the first person is obscenity, self display, the sin the whole society is organised against. You may unburden yourself to exactly two people in your life: a bondbrother and a bondsister, assigned in childhood, to whom you may speak plainly. To anyone else, including a spouse, you refer to yourself in the third person and keep your interior life sealed.
Kinnall Darival is a prince, second son, displaced by his brother's accession and exiled into a series of increasingly minor posts. He meets an offworlder from Earth who finds the whole arrangement appalling, and then travels to the southern continent for a drug that dissolves the boundary between minds, so that two people taking it together experience each other's selves entirely.
He comes back an evangelist. He gives it to his bondsister, whom he has loved without permission to say so, and the consequences of that are the end of the book.
The novel is written as his confession, in the first person, illegally, which is the point of every sentence.
Around two hundred pages, unusual in structure and genuinely alien in its central taboo.
Kinnall is not a reliable prophet. He is arrogant, self dramatising and clearly enjoying the role, and Silverberg lets the reader see the vanity underneath the liberation.
Best for readers who want anthropological science fiction from the New Wave, and a society whose repression is built into its grammar rather than into its police.
Historical Context & Significance
A Time of Changes won the 1971 Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo and the Locus.
Robert Silverberg wrote at an almost unbelievable rate in this period, publishing several novels a year through the late 1960s and early 1970s, of which this, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls and Downward to the Earth are the ones usually named. He has won five Nebulas and five Hugos and was made a Grand Master in 2004.
Silverberg has noted that the prohibition on the first person resembles the device in Ayn Rand's Anthem and that he arrived at it independently. The two books use it for opposite purposes: Rand's is about individual excellence against collectivism, and Silverberg's is about intimacy, and about a culture in which nobody is permitted to be known.