It is dark here. The flame of the candle stands still in the air. Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. We are alone here under the earth. It is a fearful word, alone. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. But we have broken many laws. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our one head.

Now look at the opening page of A Time of Changes. The resemblance is startling — Rand’s narrator alone in a tunnel, mine in a desert shack, each beginning his tale by speaking of transgressions against a rigid society. I had forgotten even the existence of her book when I began my own, and unless you would argue that whatever we read is permanently recorded in some cerebral niche and is apt to come floating to consciousness at any time subsequent, the similarity can only be considered coincidence, but a strange one. (The rest of my book is scarcely at all like Rand’s — thank goodness.)

I wrote A Time of Changes in the summer of 1970, and it was, I suppose, my response to all that had happened in the last few years of the 1960’s, that time of changes for so many of us. I had been as rigid and controlled as anyone else in the old pre-Beatle, pre-psychedelic, pre-revolutionary world of the Eisenhower years, and I had been rocked by transformations in the crazy decade that followed, transformations that had altered my attitude toward life, my way of dress, my work, and just about everything else. In 1970 I hovered emotionally and spiritually somewhere between New York and California, between the old life and the new, and I oscillated uncertainly, not yet having opted fully for California; and A Time of Changes is the record of that inner upheaval, altered by the metaphors of science fiction but thoroughly recognizable for what lay behind them.