The Pronoun as Prison, the Pronoun as Prayer

Silverberg wrote this novel in 1971, when the counterculture was already curdling into something less certain of itself, and you can feel that ambivalence in every chapter. Kinnall Darival's world of Borthan, where saying "I" is obscene and self-revelation is punishable by exile or death, reads now less like speculative anthropology and more like a diagnostic manual. The Covenant — that enforced regime of linguistic self-effacement — was meant to satirize repression. In 2026, it instead evokes something uncomfortably close to the discourse wars around pronoun usage, compelled speech, and the politics of self-identification that Silverberg could not possibly have foreseen. The book anticipated that language would become the primary battlefield for identity, that the grammar of selfhood would carry existential stakes. It got the terrain exactly right while imagining the conflict from the opposite direction: Borthan punishes self-expression, while our world increasingly polices the failure to express correctly. The mirror is cracked but still reflective.

What Silverberg got spectacularly right is the pharmacological dimension. Kinnall's Sumaran drug — a substance that dissolves the boundary between self and other, enabling direct consciousness-to-consciousness communion — is MDMA by way of psilocybin, dressed in science fiction robes. The novel appeared two years before Alexander Shulgin began his systematic work with MDMA and decades before the psychedelic therapy renaissance that now, in 2026, has reshaped clinical psychiatry. The drug sessions in the book — the terror, the ego dissolution, the overwhelming love, the post-session shame, the compulsion to evangelize, the inevitable community that forms around the experience — map onto contemporary accounts of guided psychedelic therapy with eerie precision. Silverberg even gets the backlash right: institutional panic, legal crackdowns, the scapegoating of the early adopter. What he misses is the corporatization. There is no pharmaceutical company in Borthan patenting the Sumaran powder and selling it back at markup. His dystopia is purely cultural, never economic, which marks it as a product of its era's blind spots.

The novel's deepest blind spot is gender. Halum exists to be longed for, Loimel exists to be a disappointing substitute, and the unnamed girl from the streets exists to demonstrate the drug's erotic potential. Every woman in the book is a surface against which Kinnall tests the depth of his own feeling. Halum's suicide — entering the stormshield pens to be torn apart — is rendered as a consequence of Kinnall's spiritual mission, not as a tragedy with its own interior logic. Silverberg, to his credit, acknowledged Ayn Rand's *Anthem* as a predecessor, and the debt is clear: both novels treat the recovery of "I" as the supreme revolutionary act. But where Rand's protagonist finds selfhood through reason and will, Kinnall finds it through chemical communion and erotic surrender, which is at once more honest and more dated. The book inherits from Rand and from Huxley's *Island*, and it passes something forward to Le Guin's *The Dispossessed* and, less obviously, to the empathogen fiction of the 1990s — novels and stories where drugs don't just alter perception but restructure social possibility.

What hits hardest now is not the drug sequences but the passages about Kinnall's manuscript — his desperate, fugitive act of writing an autobiography that no one may read, in a language his culture considers pornographic. In an era of compulsive self-disclosure, where billions of people narrate their inner lives daily to algorithmic audiences, the notion that self-expression could be transgressive feels almost nostalgic. Almost. Then you remember the journalists in prison, the bloggers disappeared, the social media posts used as evidence in courts from Myanmar to Missouri, and the nostalgia evaporates. Kinnall's manuscript, smuggled out by a reluctant bondbrother, is a samizdat document. The form endures even when the specific taboo shifts. Silverberg understood that the act of saying "I" is never politically neutral — it is always a claim on power, always an assertion that one's interior life matters enough to be recorded. The novel's final pages, with Kinnall writing feverishly as the authorities close in, remain genuinely moving precisely because the stakes are not metaphorical.

If Silverberg wrote *A Time of Changes* as a hymn to the liberation of the self, the intervening fifty-five years have taught us that liberation is not a stable state but a process with consequences he only partly imagined. Kinnall's drug circle grows, fractures, produces casualties, and is ultimately crushed — but he dies believing the change is irreversible, that once people have tasted communion they cannot return to isolation. The question the book now raises, which it could not have raised in 1971: what happens to a society that has torn down every barrier to self-expression and discovered that the result is not communion but noise?