to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven! (....)
It is dark here. The flame of the candle stands still in the air. Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. We are alone here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our head.
Now look at the opening page of A Time of Changes. The resemblance is startling—Rand’s narrator alone in a tunnel, mine in a desert shack, each beginning his tale by speaking of his transgression against a rigid society. I had forgotten even the existence of her book when I began my own, and unless you would argue that everything we read is permanently recorded in some cerebral niche and is apt to come floating back up to consciousness at any time, the similarity can only be considered coincidence, though a strange one. (The rest of my book is scarcely at all like Anthem—thank goodness.)
I wrote A Time of Changes in the summer of 1970, and it was, I suppose, my response to all that had been happening in American life and in my own in the last few years of the 1960s, that time of changes for so many of us. I had been as rigid and controlled as anyone else in the old pre-Beatles, pre-psychedelic, prerevolutionary world of the Eisenhower years, and I had been rocked by transformations in the crazy decade that followed, transformations that had altered my attitude toward life, my manner of dress, my work, and just about everything else. In 1970 I hovered emotionally and spiritually somewhere between my native New York and far-off, beckoning California, the center of the cultural revolution—between the old life and the new. For a long while I oscillated uncertainly, not yet having opted fully for California, and A Time of Changes is to some extent the record of that inner upheaval, modulated by the metaphors of science fiction but thoroughly recognizable for what lay behind them. (Some of my more staid friends misunderstood the book, thinking it was merely a tract urging wider and wider use of psychedelic drugs. That wasn’t my intention at all—it was the liberation that the drugs helped to bring, not the use of drugs for their own sake, that I was talking about—but it was hard to convince them.)
The novel was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, which was at the time the leading SF magazine in the field and my own main magazine publisher, and early in 1971 was published in a hardcover edition by the Science Fiction Book Club, with the first paperback edition appearing that summer from New American Library. In April of 1972 the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America awarded it the Nebula as the year’s best novel—and, not very long after I had begun my new existence in the San Francisco Bay Area, I flew down to the awards ceremony in Los Angeles to collect my handsome Lucite trophy. There was something deliciously appropriate, I think, about being handed a Nebula for A Time of Changes almost immediately after I had broken from my old confined life in New York to breathe the fresher, stranger air of California.
By now, of course, almost forty years later, I’ve lived more than half my life as a Californian. The upheavals and weirdnesses of the era in which A Time of Changes was written have become the stuff of nostalgia for those of us who lived through them, and are, for younger people, a quaint bit of ancient history from an earlier generation. So be it. A time will come when everything going on out on the cutting edge of today’s society will suffer the same fate. Meanwhile, because science fiction disguises contemporary issues in a cloak of fantastic imaginings, the books of a previous era can readily speak to readers of a later day, as I hope A Time