The 1960s and early 1970s saw a movement within science fiction to incorporate ideas from psychology, philosophy, and other soft sciences into the genre, which produced some sci-fi classics like Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from linguistics and philosophy), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (gender as a social construct), and several of Philip K. Dick’s more serious novels. In A Time of Changes, the winner of the 1971 Nebula Award for Best Novel, Robert Silverberg takes another epistemological concept as his launching point for a novel: what would a society look like if it proscribed the use of the first person singular?
Humanity has spread out from Earth in this novel, which probably takes place a few thousand years into the future, and we meet our narrator, Kinnall Darival, who lives in the autocracy of Velada Borthan. As the novel opens, he’s a refugee, living in exile in an isolated forest, although we won’t learn why until well past the midpoint of the novel. His father, the king, dies quite early in the story, after which his brother takes the crown and Kinnall heads abroad to start his own life and avoid any question of rivalry to the throne.
In Velada Borthan, all life is governed by The Covenant, which makes the use of the first person singular an obscenity, while also creating relationships of Bond Brothers and Sisters that prove relevant to Kinnall’s story. He will eventually meet a traveler from Earth named Schweiz who describes his old society, and who will also give Kinnall a consciousness-expanding drug that allows for the communion of minds between people who use it together, a dangerous idea that turns Kinnall into a revolutionary and a wanted man.
The adventure within A Time of Changes and the way it changes Kinnall’s character end up more interesting than the philosophical question Silverberg appears to be asking. The society under the Covenant seems like a garden-variety autocracy, and Silverberg doesn’t give us much evidence that the diktat against individualism has somehow led to negative results for the people within it, or for the society as a whole. There’s a general lack of civil rights, and the monarch seems to be absolute, but those conditions can exist without the anti-individualist statutes.
Instead of asking deeper questions, Silverberg instead gives us Kinnall’s inner monologues, where he feels differently, but doesn’t give any explicit explanation. It’s very namby-pamby, we’re all one, don’t take the brown acid feel-good stuff, and doesn’t play out on the page in a way that materially changes Kinnall’s life or his interactions with others. Only the drugs do that, in that some people buy into the telepathic mind-melds, some find it overwhelming, and some are repulsed. The monarchy, of course, views this as a threat, and that gives the novel its narrative greed, and puts Kinnall on the run towards the conclusion, which is very fun and satisfying. I don’t think the book achieves what Silverberg set out to do with its concept, however, and that left me disappointed at the end even though I enjoyed the read until that point.
One note on the book: The idea of a society that bans the use of “I” wasn’t new – Silverberg discovered later than Ayn Rand used it in Anthem, but he hadn’t read that book, probably because he had some taste and self-respect.
Next up: I’m reading Dr. Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved), which I mentioned in my latest newsletter.