For Terry and Carol Carr

Somebody once wrote, so I am told, a novel that contains no word that uses the letter “e.” When I first heard about it, the idea gave me the shivers; for writing novels is hard enough work using one’s free range of vocabulary, and tossing in a handicap like that is enough to guarantee a case of terminal hiccups, at the very least. Spare me from the urge to attempt such stunts, I prayed.

And then, years later, I found myself embarked on a novel in which it was forbidden for any character to refer to himself in the first person.

I had been working on it for a week or so, struggling against the strange constraint of avoiding the vertical pronoun, when I remembered that “e”-less novel. I broke into a sweat and wondered how I would ever get to the other end of my book with my sanity reasonably intact; and then I took a deep breath, told myself that I was writing my book this way neither as a stunt nor as an act of penance, and got back to work. And eventually finished the novel and had it published and won a Nebula award for it as the best science fiction book of 1971, and lived happily ever after, and I’ll never ask of myself a similar exercise again.

The purpose of avoiding the use of “I” in A Time of Changes is not to show my own cleverness, of course, but to represent, by a grammatical approximation in an equivalent language, the linguistic practices of an extraterrestrial culture so repressed, so enchained by rigorous self-effacement, that all references to self are taboo and must be handled euphemistically. It was not a particularly original notion — there are existing cultures on our own world, notably among the Eskimo, where first person singular is considered improper usage — but I thought it was reasonably new to science fiction.