The Story So Far

Life on Borthan is harsh, probably only marginally less so now compared to hundreds of years ago, when the human settlers came to this planet. Over a period of generations, the settlers constructed a religious creed, called the Covenant, which forbids “selfbaring” and general selfishness, to the point where even referring to oneself in the first-person singular is considered even worse than someone saying “fuck,” “shit,” or “cunt” in public today. This becomes a bit of a problem for Kinnall Darival, theoretically next in line to be septarch of Salla but in practice a nomad who has voyaged to Manneran in the name of settling down: ya know, finding a wife, getting a steady job, that sort of thing. He finds a wife in Loimel, a relative of Halum, Kinnall’s bondsister, who physically resembles Halum to an eerie extent but who otherwise has nothing in common with her. Their marriage is a cold one that soon turns into both parties regularly having affairs, which is not as bad a deal as it sounds; after all, marriage in Borthan is something more often done as a political maneuver than out of love. For some years, life in Manneran goes smoothly for Kinnall, but then of course something has to happen, or else this would be quite a short story.

Through having a connection with the local bureaucracy, Kinnall meets Schweiz, an Earthman who’s come to Borthan on business, and indeed it’s not every day someone from Earth comes to this borderline inhospitable backwater. Kinnall and Schweiz quickly form a bond, which is solidified when the latter procures a “potion” hiterto unknown to Borthan’s people, although this potion turns out to be a mind-altering drug that exchanges the perspectives of those using it. Schweiz convinces Kinnall to take a leap of faith and totally give in to the selfbaring the drug grants. It’s a psychedelic experience, pretty “far out” as the hippies would’ve said at the time, and it flips a switch in Kinnall’s brain seemingly in an instant. Whereas there was some resentment towards the Covenant before (namely that, being bondsiblings, Kinnall is prohibited from having sex with Halum), now it has become a full-on rebellion in Kinnall’s heart. What’s more is that there are others in Manneran who share similar sentiments, such that Kinnall will play a role in this new movement.

Enhancing Image

I hope you weren’t expecting to become attached to Loimel (in fairness, you probably weren’t), because she does not appear in this final installment at all. All we get is a couple mentions. After everything goes to shit and Kinnall gets captured, Loimel has nothing to say to him, as if she had forgotten they were even married in the first place. As for Halum, she makes her final appearance when Kinnall shares the drug with her, although Kinnall had to be convinced to do this, seeing it as a bad idea—a hunch that’s proven to be correct. As if beholden to one of those self-fulfilling prophecies, Kinnall’s reluctance to share the drug with Halum (his concern mainly coming from the fact that he knows she’ll find out about his massive crush on her) only leads her to push for sharing it harder. The experience is so traumatic, however, that Halum opts to commit suicide in a rather odd fashion. It’s been clear up to this point that Halum’s death has haunted Kinnall the whole time he’s been writing this memoir of his, although I have to admit that even with such a dramatic event finally delivered, it didn’t hit me much at all. We don’t get to know Halum very well, and even when she and Kinnall have their mutual drug trip she’s revealed to be basically a virginal angel of a human being. So, of the only two women to feature prominently in the narrative, one walks out of the story by the time the third act comes around, while the other is unable to cope with the awesome new drug her bondbrother is now peddling. One is emotionally distant for no particular reason while the other turns out to be emotionally fragile. Somehow I don’t think this would’ve won points with feminists, although compared to some of Silverberg’s other novels from this period A Time of Changes‘s misogyny is mild.

It would be easy to say this is a novel about how selfishness is a virtue, or about how greed, for lack of a better word, is good, but really it’s a novel about how emotionally connecting with people is, if not strictly necessary for human survival, something that would make living a lot more bearable. The need for human connection is a theme that recurs in Silverberg’s strongest novels from that period where he was supposedly at the height of his powers, see The Man in the Maze, Dying Inside, and “To See the Invisible Man,” a theme so persistent that he seemed to have an obsession with it. Why? I don’t know, I haven’t really looked into why Silverberg had this idea stuck in his head for years on end, despite reading essays, editorials, introductions to other people’s books, interviews, and so on. As with Yasujirō Ozu, who returned to the same basic elements in his later movies with somewhat varying degrees of success, Silverberg did similarly with his writing during the late ’60s and early ’70s, which might explain how he was able to write so many novels and short stories—a level of productivity only topped by his output in the mid-to-late ’50s, although nobody talks about that stretch of his career nowadays. He also tended towards the same character archetypes, because I would be hard-pressed to find anything that distinguishes Kinnall from most of Silverberg’s other protagonists, who likewise all share some qualities with the same person—that, it only stands to reason, being Silverberg himself. Once Kinnall tries and fails to convert Stirron to the drug cult and sits in prison, possibly awaiting execution (or maybe not, Kinnall is vague on what his punishment is to be), I feel like I’m saying farewell to yet another Silverberg surrogate.

By the way, I would bet a kidney (not one of my kidneys, somebody else’s) that Silverberg had read Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” and thought it would be neat to turn Huxley’s thesis into a novel. In fairness to Huxley, he wrote that famous essay in the ’50s, and Huxley, it must be said, is a more likable narrator than Kinnall. All the same, considering the SF readership in 1971 must’ve been at least 25% hippie, I think those folks would’ve liked A Time of Changes.

A Step Farther Out

This must be the fifth or sixth Silverberg novel from the late ’60s and early ’70s that I’ve read, and if I were to rank them it would probably land smack dab in the middle. It didn’t offend me like Up the Line did, and Silverberg put more effort (it seems to me) into A Time of Changes than Across a Billion Years and To Live Again. Silverberg wrote these novels at a feverish pace, probably with little in the way of revising. These novels share more or less all the same problems, although some are more severely afflicted than others. (It’d be a hard task to overstate how creepy and misogynistic Up the Line is.) Similarly, the misogyny that permeates A Time of Changes holds it back, but it’s also a novel that reads as being very of its time. Why SFWA members felt it deserved the Nebula more than The Lathe of Heaven, a novel that still mostly holds up to scrutiny (its function as baby’s introduction to Taoism reeks a bit of New Age hippie bullshit, but it’s quite bearable), I’m not sure. Silverberg had written better at this time, but the problem is that I’m not sure if any of his novels (barring possibly Dying Inside) from this period were deserving of any major awards.

See you next time.

The Story So Far

Kinnall Darival is writing his memoir, or maybe a confession to his crimes, as he sits in hiding, with the authorities weeks or maybe hours from capturing him. Kinnall has committed a blasphemy in his culture, a society dominated by a religious code called the Covenant, in that he has taken to be selfish, even using first-person singular pronouns. Brothan is a cutthroat planet, settled by a group of humans centuries ago, the humans in questions being basically Puritans IN SPAAAAAAAACE. Selfishness is considered taboo among Kinnall’s people, which includes revealing one’s inner emotions and turmoil to others, with the exception of one’s bondsiblings. Kinnall has (or had) a healthy relationship with Noim, his bondbrother, but he has a strong pseudo-incestuous crush on Halum, his bondsister, which is a problem since bondsiblings are forbidden from having romantic/sexual relations. This tension in their relationship lacks closure, on account of Halum being dead by the time Kinnall is telling us his story. There was another and arguably bigger problem for Kinnall, which is that when he was quite young his father, the septarch of Salla, died unexpectedly in a hunting accident, which made Stirron, Kinnall’s brother, next in line for the throne. Being presumably the person to succeed Stirron and thus the person most likely to be killed, and also not wanting the throne for himself that much, Kinnall does what any of us would do: he goes into exile.

Mind you that I’m recapping the first installment’s plot in chronological order, but Kinnall/Silverberg does not relate this shit to us as such; rather Kinnall’s memoir jumps all over the place chronologically, although the broad strokes of its trajectory are still linear. We know in advance that Halum dies and that Kinnall with meet a man from Earth named Schweiz who introduces him to a certain “potion” which alters his consciousness. Upon leaving his home province of Salla, Kinnall uses nepotism to nab a job as a day laborer, then ditching that for a sailing stint. (There is mention of some modern tech like cars and boats, but Borthan is more or less a medieval futurist landscape, like what Jack Vance was fond of writing about.) At this point there are ripples of discontent in Kinnall’s mind, against his culture’s staunch anti-individualism and the fact that he can’t bust a nut in the one girl he actually likes (a lot of Kinnall’s internal conflict boils down to sexual angst, which for some reason was the norm for Silverberg protagonists), but the dam is about the burst outright.

Enhancing Image

The second installment is primarily concerned with two relationships Kinnall forms at this point in his life, now in exile and living rather comfortably in Manneran. He quickly takes a liking to Loimel, who is either Halum’s cousin or half-sister (depending on which story you wanna belive), and is a dead ringer for her to the point where Kinnall confuses her for Halum at first. Kinnall makes no secret to us, and seems to all but say as such to Loimel herself, that he courts and then married Loimel simply because of the strong family resemblance, regardless of whatever personality Loimel herself has. This turns out to be just as well, since Loimel is shown (at least from Kinnall’s perspective) to be a totally cold-hearted and aloof woman. The result is that Kinnall knows every facet of Halum’s personality but is unable to have a physically intimate relationship with her, while Loimel is physically available but not emotionally. Is this irony? It’s hard to gauge how much of Loimel’s coldness toward Kinnall is true to how she is normally and how much it’s Kinnall projecting, since even when he’s having sex with Halum’s lookalike he’s unable to get to know Loimel as a person. Their marriage is a loveless one, although this is far from unusual in the culture of this world; on the contrary, that Kinnall and Loimel both start having affairs behind each other’s backs is considered business as usual for marriages here. I can’t tell if Silverberg is trying to make a comment on something, but it’s worth mentioning that his first marriage didn’t end until some years after A Time of Changes was published. Just as important, and perhaps unintended on Silverberg’s part, is that we don’t get to know either of the female main characters very well, despite how much Kinnall adores Halum. The men in A Time of Changes are at least knowable to some extent, but their female counterparts come off as slightly less human. I’m tempted to say this boils down to Silverberg (at least at this point in his career) just not being very good at writing women.

Then there’s Schweiz, a visitor from Earth who meets Kinnall through some bureaucratic maneuvering (reminder that Kinnall uses nepotism and charm to live comfortably like he does at this point in the story), who we heard about at the very beginning of the novel, but are only now being introduced to properly. Schweiz is described as being rather physically similar to how Silverberg was at this time, complete with the male pattern baldness, and in terms of personality he could also be said to overlap with Silverberg. This creates a bit of a problem with characterization, since Kinnall is already clearly a self-insert for Silverberg, the result being you have two Silverberg-esque characters in a room together, which sounds like a bad time if you’re not a neurotic compulsively heterosexual white man. We do get at least one good scene out of this, which is indeed the turning point in the novel. You see that Kinnall and Schweiz quickly befriend each other (maybe a little too quickly) and they soon reach that “let’s do drugs together” phase of every healthy relationship, be it platonic or romantic. (Oh what, you don’t try out mind-altering substances with your friends? For shame.) The nifty drug Schweiz brings to the table turns out to be a kind of empathy drug, in which the two participants swap perspectives and not only share each other’s personalities but their memories as well. In the span of what seems like only a few minutes you can get an impression of someone’s whole life story, and vice versa. This is so indicative of when the novel was written (the late ’60s and early ’70s, the age of the hippies) that it hurts. It’s funny because I always imagine Silverberg as one of those squares, like Jack Kerouac, who may dabble in heavy drinking and light drug use, but who seems more content to surround himself with people who are more daring and perhaps more interesting. If anything dates this novel, aside from its gender politics, it’s the optimistic view on hallucinogens.

Of course, I’m not one to talk, as I did weed regularly for a bit until a couple years ago. (Honestly the worst thing about weed, aside from the hunger and dry mouth, is that there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll feel as if you’re being sent off to meet your maker. You’ll either feel at peace with the world or you’ll be scared shitless of some impending doom which does not exist.) Needless to say this mind-altering drug breaks the dam open for Kinnall’s discontent with his society’s restrictions.

A Step Farther Out

I liked this installment more than the first by a good margin, mostly because the plot has settled in by this point and the reader is not being as barraged with backstory that hinders the pacing. I have to also admit I don’t mind Kinnall as much by now, although I would still hesitate to say I like him. It’s also a problem that Kinnall and Schweiz both feel like Silverberg’s self-inserts, and also that their friendship develops in seemingly record-time. When P. Schuyler Miller reviewed A Time of Changes he mentioned that the serial version was a “condensation” of the book, although I’ve not seen any other sources that say the book version is an expansion, and also comparing page counts between the magazine and book versions they seem to clock in at about the same length. Still, I’m cautiously optimistic about where Silverberg takes this story for its final installment, since I’m at least liking it more than most of the other novels of his from this era that I’ve read. We’ll just have to wait and see.

See you next time.

Who Goes There?

Robert Silverberg celebrated his 90th birthday this past January, making him one of the last living authors to have been active at least adjacent with the New Wave in the late ’60s. Not only that, but Silverberg had made his writing debut a whole decade earlier, and if you look through certain magazine issues in the early ’50s you might find a teenaged Silverberg in the letters section. He has his faults, but there are few people who’ve been more dedicated to the field for as long a span of time. Even as he announced his retirement from writing fiction about a decade ago, Silverberg still gets involved with fandom events and even writes editorials for Asimov’s Science Fiction to this day. The late ’60s and early ’70s are when SF historians consider Silverberg to have reached his artistic stride, which if I’m being honest is a claim I’ve found to be a little overexaggerated. Certainly the quantity of Silverberg’s output at this point can’t be denied, but the quality of his work from this period is a good deal more hit-or-miss than I’ve been led to believe. A Time of Changes was the only Silverberg novel from this period to win a major SF award; it won the Nebula, beating out Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Is that victory deserved? Hmmm.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, March to May-June 1971. It was released in June of that year by Doubleday. I’m not sure if it’s in print in the US at this moment, but there’s an ebook edition from Open Road Media and a paperback from Gollancz.

Enhancing Image

Generations ago the planet Borthan was discovered by spacefaring humanity and thus colonized, although it’s a hostile environment with harsh weather and, like Earth, a great deal of water on its surface. The settlers, who were basically like Vikings, eventually forgot their history, the result being that human culture on Borthan has devolved into a kind of medieval futurism. You’ve got lords and barons and the like, complete with a peasant class, but more importantly this is a society that is so rooted in selflessness that it’s taboo even to use first-person singular pronouns in conversation. Everyone is supposed to look out for everyone else, to the detriment of the individual. This is important context to get out of the way first, because otherwise you might think the setting is more or less your typical Tolkien-esque fantasy realm. There are bits of modern tech, such as automobiles, but technology plays little role in the story. A Time of Changes is ostensibly SF, but it’s actually closer to being science-fantasy along the lines of The Book of the New Sun, to the point where I wonder if Gene Wolfe had taken some inspiration from Silverberg’s novel. To put it another way, it’s the kind of setting Jack Vance was fond of inventing, in which you have what is basically a medieval fantasy world but with an SFnal twist.

Of course, another thing A Time of Changes has with Wolfe’s series is the characterization of its narrator, the anti-hero Kinnall Darival, as what we’re reading turns out to be Kinnall’s memoir—or maybe it’d be more accurate to call it a bit of confessional writing. In a few reviews I’ve written before I’ve taken issue with what are depressingly common fallacies when it comes to writing first-person narration, which is why I’ve not been a fan of it myself on the occasion I’ve been able to write fiction. There are too many questions that can be potentially raised when dealing with a first-person narrator, of the sort that would distract from the reading experience; but thankfully Silverberg gives us a pretty clear reason up front as to why he wrote the novel in this way. Not only is Kinnall writing a tell-all account of his apparent rise to becoming a rebellious figure, but he writes in first-person specifically as a middle finger to his society’s aversion to the concept of selfhood. Kinnall is kind of a selfish asshole with some psychosexual hang-ups, but at least he doesn’t try to make excuses for some questionable past behavior. I mean a big part of Kinnall’s personal trauma is the fact that he clearly wanted to have a romantic/sexual relationship with Halum, his bondsister, only that Halum died years ago, tragically young.

Right, so the people of this world do not have familial relations in the traditional sense. You don’t have a pair of loving parents to whom you’re related to blood, and you also potentially two sets of siblings: blood-related siblings and bondsiblings. Everyone has bondbrothers and bondsisters, who are basically step-siblings. So Kinnall has some pseudo-incestuous feelings for Halum, and even if she were still alive this is something he’s unlikely to confess to her. There’s also Noim, Kinnall’s bondbrother, who proves useful in getting him out of the country when the political climate becomes risky. To make a long story short, Kinnall is son to the prime septarch of Salla, one of Borthan’s provinces. (I just realized it’s called a “septarch” because there are other monarchic figures who share rule of the province.) The problem is that Kinnall has a blood brother, Stirron, who becomes septarch instead of Kinnall. Mind you that the brothers are very young when this all happens, as the septarch dies unexpectedly during a hunting expedition. Now, if you know anything about the history of monarchy as form of government then you know it can be perilous to be king/queen/whatever and have siblings waiting in the wings; or, just as perilously, you might be the sibling in question. It becomes clear that Stirron is overburdened with being prime septarch (which is to say the one the other septarchs have to get approval from) of Salla, and yet Kinnall resents the structure of this society too much to become a leader of it.

The result is a picaresque, of sorts. Kinnall gets the hell out of Dodge and becomes a day laborer in another land, for a time, before becoming a sailor by the end of this installment. Something odd about A Time of Changes is that while its plot trajectory is broadly in chronological order, Kinnall can’t help but allude to future events and characters that haven’t come along yet, such as Schweiz, an Earthman whom Kinnall befriends, and whom we hear about way before we actually meet him. We hear about Kinnall being introduced to a mind-altering “potion” that Schweiz gives him way before this event happens in-story. Characters are mentioned as having died while they’re still alive in Kinnall’s recollection of them. As such, I can already tell that this is a hard novel to spoil. The unusual structure and diction can be explained by the fact that Kinnall’s never written a book before, let alone a first-person narrative, and so he’s still new to this whole confession-writing ordeal. Still, it’s awkward, not helped by Kinnall himself being a thorny character in the way that Silverberg’s protagonists tend to be. I’m gonna be brutally honest and say that maybe with a few exceptions Silverberg’s protagonists all more or less act and think the same way, which is to say they’re dreary and neurotic heterosexuals with both high sex drives and psychosexual angst. They’re also very male. Granted that the objectifying of women here is not as bad as in some of Silverberg’s other novels, one still finds a few cases of “she breasted boobily.”

There Be Spoilers Here

I dunno.

A Step Farther Out

As has happened to me almost every time when reading a Silverberg novel from this era, my feelings are mixed. It took me two days to read this installment when really it should’ve only taken one, and part of my slowness is that there are sequences I find way more engaging than others; or, to put it another way, there are sequences where Silverberg strains my patience. At least far it’s doing better than, say, Up the Line, or Across a Billion Years, which are novels that make bad impressions early on and do little to nothing to fix things. Some of Silverberg’s bad habits (namely his tendency to sexualize every female character he introduces) are on display, but as of yet there’s nothing too egregious. I think the more pressing issue is that despite being one-third into the novel now, I feel as if the plot has only barely just started kicking into gear. The pacing is “deliberate,” which is to say it’s slow, and given this is a short novel it’s a slowness that Silverberg really can’t afford. But he’s gonna make us wait.

See you next time.