Woman on the Edge of Time

SPOILERS: Oh my days, what a fantastic read. But so sad, and so sad that it could have been written today but was actually published before I was born. Not only have we not learned anything, we're hurtling toward the bad future. Reading this felt at times like being given proper meaningful answers to the question But How Should We Live? I wish I'd read it twenty years ago, but then I probably wouldn't have understood either the question or the answer! This is a wonderfully crafted, terribly prescient novel about trauma, recovery, survival, the many possible futures, all topped off with a {SPOILER} clever twist But Was It Really A Mental Health Episode that made me sad and awestruck at the layers of cleverness going on here. Standing show more ovation from me. show less

Unusually, I read this book is a large number of short bursts, rather than two or three extended sessions. In part this was because over the past week I've discovered two new TV shows, one of which has eight series, and binge-watched them. The other reason is that 'Woman on the Edge of Time' is painful and intense to read. I never considered giving up on it, I hasten to add, as it is richly rewarding. The painful nature of the novel stems from the contrast between the life of protagonist Connie and the utopian future she glimpses by communicating psychically with another woman named Luciente. Connie's background of poverty, tragedy, and subsequent appalling treatment in a mental hospital is deeply upsetting to read. Piercy is show more unflinching in her portrayal of the discrimination, neglect, racism, sexism, and cruelty that Connie experiences. Despite this, Connie is an interesting, vibrant character with agency and depth, not merely a tragic victim.

Luciente and the utopian future are evoked with equal elegance. Indeed, this novel contains the best thought-out utopia I've come across since le Guin's 'The Dispossessed'. It provoked a recent conversation with a friend about utopian sci-fi - which seems to be rarely written since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the whole 'End of History' cultural turn. All of the recent utopias my friend and I could think of assume the end of scarcity; essentially that technology will save humanity from needing to re-shape our social structures to deal with climate change, inequality, and discrimination. I think this demonstrates the power of the thesis that (not really) representative democracy and (not really) free market capitalism are not only the best thing humanity can come up with, but the only configuration of government and resource management that we can imagine. (If I've missed a recent political utopia, please let me know, as I'd love to read it!)

Piercy's vision of the future is impressively credible on a number of levels. It doesn't ignore interpersonal conflict, assume unlimited resources, or disregard history. I was particularly pleased with the ways in which misogyny had been uprooted. In this future, there are no gendered pronouns, everyone is 'per' or 'person'. There are no natural births, so that any gender can choose to become a mother. The institution of marriage doesn't exist. Gender presentation and sexuality aren't subject to discrimination or stereotyping. It's a very appealing vision, really. I'd like to live there, with the caveat that I object to their continued use of the death penalty.

I also appreciated the brief foray into another option for the future, this one a grim, polluted, and corporate-controlled dystopia. As with the utopia, this seems to have aged quite well; 'Woman on the Edge of Time' was first published in 1976. Depressingly, since then the communications and bio-technology that could enable certain aspects of the utopian future have emerged, but the economic and cultural trends have brought us much closer to the dystopia.

In order to avoid spoilers, I won't say much about the ending. Suffice to say, I liked the ambiguity and lack of neat resolution. And as with the rest of the book, I found it moving. 'Woman on the Edge of Time' is not a cheerful novel. In fact, the vision of utopia made me feel very sad, sadder than any grim dystopia would. When reading about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I can shiver and appreciate running water and jaffa cakes. Whereas this utopia presents such a beautiful way to live, free from the conspicuous consumption, inequality, and environmental degradation of the 21st century, that it makes me feel wistful. I highly recommend it, though, as a genuine, intelligent utopia. They're a lot harder to write than dystopias, but in my opinion equally powerful and even more important. show less

Challenging in places, but an interesting read. The central character lives in a world very unfamiliar to me, among the Hispanic American poor, bogged down in violence, addiction, and prostitution, and then trapped in a labyrinth of medical psychiatry which treats people only as examples of confidently misdiagnosed and brutally mistreated mental conditions.

Other reviewers have described this as "dated", but what struck me was the remarkable way in which the themes of feminism, sexual diversity, and gender fluidity chime with the concerns of the present day. I had to look back in the book to check that it was actually written 40 years ago. The sections in which we travel to the (possible) future(s) are a kind of updated version of H. G. show more Wells's "The Time Machine", with the beautiful and childlike Eloi represented by Luciente's contentedly anarchic and artistic people, and the bestial Morlocks by a world where a woman can be confined to a room for the amusement of others and entertained entirely by a screen, attended by a cyborg/android that can read human emotional states. As with many utopias/dystopias, they represent aspects of today's world extrapolated into caricature. I loved being in Luciente's world, where the constraints of sex, gender, and sexuality are outgrown, but the inevitable conflict of personalities is dealt with in an adult way, accepting the imperfections of human reality.

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Connie's ultimate crime is that she is poor and powerless, a woman and a member of an ethnic minority. People with a great deal or very little power sometimes use her as an example, sometimes harm her for their own enjoyment or to gain some little benefit for themselves but most of all she is ignored. Her capabilities are undervalued at all times and encouraged seldom. Her desires, her understanding of reality are completely irrelevant to almost everyone. There are some people who love and respect her, they mostly are people of color and always are people without power. Is she mentally ill? Does she hallucinate a world in which individuals and the earth are valued while wholesome people war with the ultimate capitalist culture, or does show more she really visit other times and other places through the strength of her mind?

This book is as relevant as when it was written in the 1970's because the same fights remain, the rich and powerful do whatever they want, the poor and undereducated are made to stay in their place and be grateful for what they have. Three cheers for Connie. show less

After bashing her niece's pimp with a bottle, Connie Ramos is committed to a mental hospital, where she begins telepathically time traveling to a utopian future.

Published in 1976, Woman on the Edge of Time reminded me quite a lot of two other feminist speculative fiction classics of roughly the same period: The Female Man by Joanna Russ and Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin. All three present idealized anarchist utopias, as well as brief depictions of a dystopian counterpart. These utopian communities are presented as environmentally conscious and sustainable, having achieved equality among the sexes and races (albeit in different ways), where the people live communally and in harmony with nature. (Of the three, I liked Le Guin's show more the best, but it is the most recently published and the most fully baked, I think.) These are not novels so much as vehicles for ideas about how people could possibly be, and after reading so many of these--including a few minor versions not mentioned--I feel I've exhausted this narrow sub-genre. The ideas are attractive, but having moved well past the Age of Aquarius, they seem much more unworkable, relying on an idealized vision of human nature.

Of more interest in Piercy's novel is the present-day life of Connie Ramos, who is poor, Hispanic, undereducated, mentally ill and pretty much a victim of all our social institutions. Connie's plight, having been committed and then subjected to heinous experiments against her will, almost make us cheer her drastic actions after she accepts that she is at war. She is at war against our systems themselves, and the deck is well stacked against her. It's never very clear if Connie is literally time-traveling or if she is hallucinating as an escape. Given the epilogue with her medical history, I'm inclined to believe the latter, but I don't know if that is what Piercy intended as the author. There is a lot here to chew on, but I'm not sure Piercy has assembled it into a cohesive story. She seems to be trying to say so much that nothing comes through as powerfully as she might have intended. If she had focused on Connie in the present, and scaled back all the future scenes, using them more as an indicator of Connie's troubled psyche, this probably would have been a much more effective novel. show less

That Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is my favorite book did Woman on the Edge of Time no favors. After it was clear this book would not be anywhere close to the same level, I did my best to set aside direct comparisons—that didn’t really end up happening, but I do believe, even outside direct comparison to Le Guin, this book falls short in many respects.

My biggest critique is the lack of ethical complexity. I’m not of the belief that writing & thinking about utopia is imagining an actually perfect society. And I say that as a proponent of utopian socialism. Utopianism, to me, politically, is the commitment to imagining & building better futures. It seems that Piercy was trying to sell us her utopia, and in doing so, sacrificed show more word-building and deprived her story of moral complexity. Where her construction of utopia succeeds is in its imagination and in its exploration of alternate possibilities for systems, institutions, and customs that are today so ingrained that they go unquestioned & unchallenged.

I also found the writing lackluster. That, in combination with two other elements—instances of clunky plot progression and constant telling-not showing (especially when it’s clear Piercy is trying to make a political point)—led to several eye roll moments. I largely enjoyed reading this book, though, so it’s not like it was unbearable or anything.

Though this book is 5 decades old, it’s hard not to cringe at the treatment of race and ethnicity. Race/ethnicity is hypervisible—except for whiteness, that is. And there’s a thread of flattening. The main character, Connie, is Chicana, and there’re aspects of weird stereotyping in her backstory & depiction. There’s also the matter of how Black characters are frequently described—with disproportionate focus on their physical appearance, often exoticizing and sexualizing.

In the utopian future, the book depicts a rather… novel implementation of colorblindness. Phenotypical race is decoupled from “culture” such that the village we are shown in the future calls themselves “Wamponaug” (alternate spelling of Wampanoag? indigenous american tribe of the northeast), and say “Wamponaug Indians are the source of our [the village’s] culture,” though their village (like the rest of their broader society) is racially diverse. Another entire village calls themselves Black. I think there is potential in this idea, but Piercy has not done much with it, and her track record on race & ethnicity throughout the book betrays her lack of personal experience & shallow knowledge of white supremacy (which remains completely unaddressed).

All in all, it was still worth a read. I enjoyed the imagination of Piercy’s utopia, and I found it intellectually stimulating to critique the book’s political perspective & positioning. Purely on the quality of the book, though, it’s closer to 2 stars. If you want a well-written, well-crafted utopian novel with moral complexity, read The Dispossessed instead (not much in the way of contending with white supremacy, however). show less

This is one of those books that I didn't necessarily read because I was enjoying it, but because it's an important contribution to its genre.

The book is about Connie, a Latina in New York City. She lives alone (she has been twice widowed, and her daughter has been taken away by Child Protection Services). She has a beloved niece, and she gets in an argument with her niece's pimp and hits him in the face with a glass bottle. For that, she is unjustly put in a horrible mental institution where she is kept on heavy sedatives and subjected to medical experiments.

While all of this is going on in her daily life, she is visited by Luciente, a woman from the future. Connie learns that her empathy and ability to connect with people gives her the show more ability to time travel. She frequently travels to the future to learn about Luciente's world, which is an anti-capitalist, eco-feminist utopia.

I found Connie's time traveling to be rather tedious. There isn't much of a storyline to most of it: for the most part, Luciente shows Connie around, and Connie asks a lot of bombastic questions about what she is seeing, and seems very resistant to most of the changes in the future. This often devolves into a kind of contrived dialectic dialog where it is clear that the only reason for the dialog is to give the characters a chance to describe their society in detail. For the middle half of the book, there is very little action, just a lot of descriptions of this future utopia. It felt like Pierce just wanted to describe her idea of a perfect world and invented a flimsy frame story so that she could talk about every aspect of the world: polyamory, gender fluidity, education, conflict resolution, genetic engineering, holidays and celebrations, food preparation, etc.

However, it gradually becomes clear that all is night right in the utopia: Luciente mentions that the reason they are bringing Connie to the future is so that she can influence the events of the past to make sure that this future happens. As Connie's life becomes more troubled, the future becomes less utopian, and Connie feels a stonger imperative to prevent the doctors at the mental hospital from experimenting on her so that she can save the future.

When she is not traveling to the future, Connie's storyline is a scathing indictment of the unjust treatment of the poor and mentally-ill. This can make for some very traumatic reading at times.

The book has a twist ending, which I won't give away... but I will say that when I first read the ending, I found it very disappointing, but the more I have thought about the book, the more the ending totally changes the rest of the book, to the point that I am almost tempted to read it again.

What makes this book remarkable is how much it is ahead of its time, especially for science fiction. This feels like the kind of science fiction that would be written now and would make the Sad Puppies angry than the kind of book that was written 45 years ago. show less