A Time of Changes
Written by Robert Silverberg
Narrated by Pete Bradbury
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Robert Silverberg
<p>Robert Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and the prestigious <em>Prix Apollo.</em> He is the author of more than one hundred science fiction and fantasy novels -- including the best-selling Lord Valentine trilogy and the classics <em>Dying Inside</em> and <em>A Time of Changes</em> -- and more than sixty nonfiction works. Among the sixty-plus anthologies he has edited are <em>Legends</em> and <em>Far Horizons,</em> which contain original short stories set in the most popular universe of Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, and virtually every other bestselling fantasy and SF writer today. Mr. Silverberg's Majipoor Cycle, set on perhaps the grandest and greatest world ever imagined, is considered one of the jewels in the crown of speculative fiction.</p>
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Reviews for A Time of Changes
110 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed the book. The author explores some evocative ideas and the prose is pleasant to read
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What a fantastic story this is and full of incredible imagery..wonderfully narrated by an expert of the craft.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is more of a cultural and philosophical study than anything else, true 'speculative fiction'. On the planet of Borthan, settled by humans a long time ago, people are extremely self-sufficient. So much so, that 'self-baring' or 'self-sharing' between people is forbidden and verbal references to self are taboo. 'I' and 'me' are obscenities. Because of the lack of openness, almost all interpersonal transactions are handled with contracts. There is a strange sort of religion that makes use of 'drainers', basically confessors. in this setting we meet Darival Kinnall, second son of a ruler of one of the countries. Darival becomes obsessed with this situation and we follow him through the rest of the book. I thought this was quite interesting and well written, but by it's nature it is not full of action and I thought there was a bit too much of Darival's sex life.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Book focused mostly on an idea and its impact - what if a society would try to avoid human sharing of feelings to each other. Tells the life of one member of such a society that discovers that other possibilities exist. Does not make a very in-depth analysis of the impact of the idea on the world, just hints at people being more unhappy and unable to understand each other. Well written and a believable character, with an interesting world description, but lacks some depth into influences and mechanisms of the analysed idea. While the action happens on a different planet, could have been as well a different country with different traditions.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the far future, Earth is a worn-out backwater and humanity is spread across the galaxy on worlds that began as colonies, but now feel like home, each with its own long history of a thousand years or more, and each with its own unique culture. One of the strangest is on Borthan, where the founding settlers established the Covenant, which teaches that the self is to be despised, and forbids anyone to reveal his innermost thoughts or feelings to another. On Borthan, the filthiest obscenities imaginable are the words "I" and "me." For the heinous crime of "self-baring," apostates have always paid with exile or death, but after his eyes are opened by a visitor from Earth, Kinnall Darival, prince of Salla, risks everything to teach his people the real meaning of being human.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5now 84% done with the Nebulas...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Borthan is a planet populated by people who refer themselves as "one" instead of "I". The self is despised as a weakness and one never reveals his innermost feelings and thoughts. "Self-baring" is a crime.The book is about the story of Darival, written in first person, it tells how he encounters a way out of the imposed confines of the mind.It is an absorbing read, but is the story of only one single person, it would've been an interesting mental project to develop it on a grander scale and work out how that puritanical society might evolve. Regardless, as a thought experiment this is an example of excellent science-fiction writing.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My first Silverberg. This isn’t science fiction proper, Silverberg only uses an alien planet to illustrate an extreme societal concept – that of denial of self. Given how we’ve gone through the ‘me decade’ and morphed into a ‘me society’, it’s challenging to grasp why a society would choose to mandate a dissolution of the individual. This has both benefits and detriments and Silverberg illustrates that pretty well.The main character tries to become a force of change in his society. Cast out of his role as 2nd son, he's never quite fit in anywhere, even in the heavily proscribed friendships assigned to him from birth. His whole life is uncomfortable to him and he's on the run a lot. Finally he ends up in a position of some power, but it is an illusion. Mentally and emotionally he is unstable, but has no outlet for his anguish. No wonder he turns to the drug that can psychically link him to another human. The disconected nature of his society has made him a beaten, desperate man. He longs for change, but has not the vision or the fortitude to be the catalyst and it is pretty sad to watch him spiral into failure and ignominy.One thing that is sort of off-putting to me is the fact that supposedly we’ve got this future society with access to technology not using it at all (there are archaic references to ground machines, air machines and telephones still). It’s funny that a lot of future societies are set up as monarchies with agrarian civilizations and old-world politics and rules. I think it’s a two-fold symptom; the information age hadn’t yet occurred when this was written and Silverberg did not have the vision to see how society would change on a dime. Also, I think the agrarian, monarchical society is innately romantic and lends itself to extreme behavior much better than a republican or democratic society, so that’s why it works better as a vehicle for philosophy and symbology driven stories. It does ruin things for me in a sense though.