The novel was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, my main magazine publisher at that time, and early in 1971 was published in a hardcover edition by the Science Fiction Book Club, with the first paperback edition appearing that summer. In April of 1972 the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America awarded it a Nebula as best novel of the year — and, a few days after I had begun my new existence in the San Francisco area, I flew down to the awards ceremony in Los Angeles to collect my handsome lucite trophy. There was something deliriously appropriate, I think, about being handed a Nebula for A Time of Changes the very week that I had broken from my old confined life in New York to breathe the fresher, stranger air of California.
— Robert Silverberg
Oakland, California
May 1978
1
I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself.
That statement is so strange to me that it screams in my eyes. I look at it on the page, and I recognize the hand as my own — narrow upright red letters on the coarse gray sheet — and I see my name, and I hear in my mind the echoes of the brain-impulse that hatched those words. I am Kinnall Darival and I mean to tell you all about myself. Incredible.
This is to be what the Earthman Schweiz would call an autobiography. Which means an account of one’s self and deeds, written by one’s self. It is not a literary form that we understand on our world — I must invent my own method of narrative, for I have no precedents to guide me. But this is as it should be. On this my planet I stand alone, now. In a sense, I have invented a new way of life; I can surely invent a new sort of literature. They have always told me I have a gift for words.