{"id":11581,"date":"2026-10-20T08:18:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T12:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11581"},"modified":"2026-10-19T20:19:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T00:19:51","slug":"a-time-of-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/20\/a-time-of-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"A Time of Changes."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019s Babel-17<\/a><\/em> (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from linguistics and philosophy), Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s The Left Hand of Darkness<\/a><\/em> (gender as a social construct), and several of Philip K. Dick\u2019s more serious novels. In A Time of Changes<\/a><\/em>, 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s a refugee, living in exile in an isolated forest, although we won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n