In this I was wrong, naturally. (Absolutely new ideas in science fiction are a lot less common than is generally suspected. I mean altogether new ideas, not merely ingenious variants on familiar ones; the last one of these I can think of is Bob Shaw’s “slow glass” concept, and that was a dozen years ago. It will probably turn out that something much like slow glass figures in an 1883 Jules Verne novel, anyway.) My central situation in A Time of Changes had at least one well-known previous use — in a book that I had read in 1953 and long since forgotten. This was Ayn Rand’s Anthem, a short novel first published in 1946 and dedicated to Rand’s usual theme, “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” In the dystopian world of Anthem the collective society has triumphed, and the first person singular pronoun has been abolished; the narrator speaks of himself as “we,” as does everyone else in that society, but eventually he discovers the Unspeakable Word and launches a revolution intended to restore the sacred rights of the individual ego. This is not quite what I was doing in A Time of Changes, where the problem is not all-engulfing collectivist socialism but rather a dour, ritualized, formalized pseudo-modesty that conceals ferocious macho self-assertiveness. But the narrative effect is the same. Rand’s character and mine struggle toward liberation of self, moving through grammatical thickets, hers speaking of himself as “we” and mine speaking of himself as “one,” and there is a similar rigid courtliness to the style. What struck me as eerie, though, was the similarity between Rand’s opening lines and my own. When I rediscovered Anthem in 1972, almost twenty years after I had last read or thought of it, and several years after I had written A Time of Changes, this, to my astonishment, was its opening paragraph:

It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven! (…)