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This book is far, far too preoccupied with its leading man's premature ejaculation.The repetitive fact that he puts his penis in many willing receptacle women - but never sticks it in the one woman he truly lusts after - really distracted me from the story where he learns to bare his soul... or be human... ............Guys, he gets high on a drug and it changes his life.The End.In case you're wondering, (view spoiler)[Kinnall does finally learn to control his ejaculations during sex, for a bit o...
Robert Silverberg is a legend, one of the all-time greats, and among these all-time greats he is probably the most underrated. He has Hugo and Nebula Awards up the wazoo but is relatively unknown compared to the giants of the genre like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, IMHO he belongs up there with them in term of accolades.A Time of Changes is one of his best novels if his Goodreads page is anything to go by. However, if you have never read anything by Silverberg before you may want to start with
It's a truism widely held that science fiction isn't so much about the future or the exotic locales it portrays as it is about the here and now, refracted through the lens of otherness. A Time of Changes certainly bolsters that theory. It won a Nebula award when it was published, possibly because of that very resonance with a particular time and place—but in the cold light of the 21st Century, it seems a little harder to read.The story has two main quirks that intersect to create this impression...
This is one of Silverberg’s best novels from his most prolific and creative period in the late 1960s/early 1970s, along with Downward to the Earth and Dying Inside. It’s about a repressive human society on a distant planet called Borthan, in which the terms “I” and “myself” are obscenities, and “self-bearing” is a serious crime. It’s the story of Kinnall Darival, the second son of a Plutarch (essentially a prince), who must leave his home to avoid being a threat to his older brother’s claim to r...
This definitely feels like one of the most hippie books Silverberg ever wrote. You've got many of his classic tropes: questioning authority, understanding older (primitive) cultures to find enlightenment, drugs, free (and sometimes WEIRD) love, and transformation in some way or other. It's a pretty wild story.
I have never used a gas-powered lawnmower. I've seen other people use them, I've read about them, and I'm pretty sure I know what they're for. Still, I wouldn't write a gas-powered lawnmower manual.I wish certain science fiction authors would have the same humility in the face of writing sex scenes. Otherwise, this was a fun book.
This 1971 novel won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Hugo, but I have to confess I found it to be quite underwhelming.Robert Silverberg offers a first-person memoir of a future human (descended from Earthlings) on a far distant planet. In his society words like "I" and "me" are considered obscenities. Burdening others with one's individuality, sharing one's self with them, is held to be a sin that should be limited whenever possible. When he meets a man from Earth with a rare and illeg...
A Time for Changes by Robert Silverberg is difficult to rate and even more difficult to review. I can begin by saying that I liked it. Silverberg tells a good story, he’s a fine writer and his narration draws the reader in. Set in the distant future, on a planet inhabited by humans for thousands of years, but still with the knowledge of far off earth as an anachronistic home, we follow the life of Kenal, second son of a king in a strictly primogeniture hierarchy. The world is also strictly in th...
Gripping on-the-run memoir of an alien from a repressed culture seeking communal enlightenment via drugs. Hippie hallmarks of sex and psychedelics, but aged well.
A Time of Changes won the Nebula Award for best novel of 1971. I never numbered it as among my favorite Silverberg titles, and after having listened to the audiobook version I haven't changed my opinion. It's a very well-written book, nicely paced and plotted, swinging back and forth in time to heighten tension and underline events and emphasize points. Silverberg was at his best in portraying complex characters here. It's very much a novel of the 1960's, being the story of finding and being you...
This is a surprisingly different read. At the very first, I thought it was going to be an alien-Odyssey, a SF treatment of the greek legend, with just a hint of something truly interesting, culturally, in that the entire race, or nearly the entire race, is devoted to self-abnegation.Imagine, then, instead of relying on the world-building adventure that it began with, it turned into a very distinctive novel of the drug culture that reflects 1971 perfectly, changing Ulysses into Timothy Leary, and...
Storyline: 2/5Characters: 2/5Writing Style: 2/5World: 1/5This is my fifth Robert Silverberg book, and it reaffirmed for me what I regard as his most distinctive quality: the wide divide between potential and execution. In his heyday Silverberg was reportedly writing 250,000 a words a month, and his books show it. They betray that they were hatched by an imaginative and rascally mind, stitched together by someone with an instinctual feel for plotting, and then glossed over with a stain of science...
'A Time of Changes' is classic Robert Silverburg of the sort that he rightly recieves acclaim for, but it suffers in my opinion from the fact that Silverburg makes no attempt at all to really maintain the fantastic conceit which is at the heart of the story. That conceit of the story is a world where self-deprication is so esteemed as virtuous and putting oneself forward is likewise deemed immoral, that no one is allowed to refer to oneself in the first person. The pronoun 'I' therefore is a tru...
4.0 to 4.5 stars Another intelligent and provocative story by Robert Silverberg who seems to have a real gift for evocative stories. This strong, emotional tale involves the journey of a repressed member of a repressed society to open himself up and find his “self."The novel is set on a distant planet (originally colonized from an Earth over-populated and polluted). The planet's population lives by the "Covenant" whose most notable characteristic is the complete and utter denial of "self." Words...
An excellently written novel by Silverberg. It is written in the form of a memoir by one who has gone into hiding after taking on a mission to change the ways of his world by freeing its citizens of the covenants constraint of the forbidden practice of acknowledgment of one's self. Had Silverberg come up with this idea and attempted this in the 1950's, it might have a pulpier title like, "The Man Who Dared Say "I". I'm glad the idea struck him twenty years later.
When settlers first colonized Borthan, they set up a society and a religion called "The Covenant" that makes "self-bearing" into a taboo. People cannot share their deepest thoughts with others, with the sole exception being one's "bond brother" and "bond sister". One can never say the words "I" or "me", because that indicates a sort of self-infatuation, or "self bearing". Those words are the most terribly obscene words one can possibly utter. This science fiction novel is written as an autobiogr...
Puritans to the stars? Something like that. As usual, Silverberg delves into a complex issue with realistic characters & manages to keep them distant enough that I never manage to care about them. This has an interesting premise, a belief system of self-containment that our main character eventually fights. There are elements from many great classics, Heart of Darkness, The Scarlet Letter, & others. I could appreciate the complex theme, the world building, & tragedy, but it never sucked me in. H...
After four years of successive losses, sci-fi great Robert Silverberg finally picked up his first Nebula Award in 1972. His 1967 novel "Thorns" had lost to Samuel R. Delany's "The Einstein Intersection," his brilliant '68 novel "The Masks of Time" had been bested by Alexei Panshin's equally brilliant "Rite of Passage," '69's time travel tale "Up the Line" had succumbed to Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," while 1970's unforgettable "Tower of Glass" had been beaten by Larry Niven's...
This is a book of its time, and as such I've rated my enjoyment of it in the present. Had I read this as a teenager, or back in '71, had I been 20 years older, i would probably be giving it 5 stars.It is clearly, and perhaps to a modern eye, clumsily, about Acid, and the counter-culture that went with it. As such it can only be applauded.The sensibilities it attempts to sway are as relevant today, as the authoritarian thinking of the predominant Western cultures has fossilised, and is as conserv...
When you're reading Silverberg you can count on one thing - it's gonna be a weird ride. The Nebula winner for 1971 delivers on that promise (even though The Lathe of Heaven is, in one's humble opinion, is a better book).The world building is exquisite, and the hunt scene is a nice example of an especially well designed world - but it's almost inconsequential to the novel and the story line itself. The real action is within the souls of the nicely shaped out characters - the world is build just s...