A Time Of Changes

Robert Silverberg published A Time of Changes in 1971. It won the Nebula Award for best novel that year, and it was also nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards in 1972.

The society of the book forbids the first person. Words such as I and me are treated as obscenities or social errors, and people speak about themselves as though they were somebody else. Into that world comes a drug that gives the protagonist, Kinnall Darival, telepathic contact with other people, and the experience of sharing another mind gives him the courage to work against the culture he was raised in.

The novel is presented as an autobiography written by Kinnall while he waits for the authorities to catch him and put him in prison for what he has done. Silverberg has noted that the device of a forbidden I also appears in Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, and that he did not know of her book when he wrote his. It is one of the titles for which he is best known, and it belongs with the science fiction of its period that used invented societies to examine ideas about the self.