4) A Time of Changes, by Robert Silverberg

Two more Nebula winners to read, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer.

I thought I’d read a fair amount of Silverberg when I was a teenager but this one had definitely passed me by. I thought it was rather good. The narrator, living in a culture so reserved that the words “I” and “me” are obscenities, gets hold of a drug that allows him to telepathically share thoughts with others, and sets out to revolutionise his society. Sounds a bit like a metaphor for the late 1960s, but I thought it was very well done. Would make an interesting paired reading with Dying Inside. Probably deserved to win the Nebula that year; I haven’t read any of the other nominees except The Lathe of Heaven which is not as good as this. It was beaten for the Hugo by To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which I guess is more of a Hugo book than a Nebula book. (As a Zelazny fan, I’d have voted for Jack of Shadows that year myself.)