Woman on the Edge of Time
First edition, 1976
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy follows Consuelo "Connie" Ramos, a poor Mexican American woman in her thirties who has been committed to a New York state psychiatric hospital. Connie is not delusional. She is poor, brown, female, and without social capital, and the institutional machinery that has confined her operates with the indifference of a system that has predetermined what she is. Through a telepathic connection with a visitor named Luciente, she is able to travel to two possible futures. One is a decentralized, ecologically sound, post-gender society in coastal Massachusetts. The other is a corporate dystopia in which women's bodies have been fully commodified. The novel argues that the present contains both futures simultaneously, and that which one arrives depends on what people do now. A foundational work of feminist speculative fiction, cited in nearly every serious discussion of the genre. First editions are genuinely difficult to find in collectible condition.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (81). ISBN: 0394499867. #10841.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (81). ISBN: 0394499867. #10841.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Woman on the Edge of Time is as much a novel about the dystopia of the present as it is a vision of possible futures. In the present-day sections, Connie Ramos moves through a world in which every institution she encounters, the mental health system, the welfare system, the legal system, the medical system, treats her not as a person to be helped but as a problem to be managed. Piercy drew heavily on documented practices of the 1970s psychiatric system, including the experimental use of psychosurgery and behavior modification on institutionalized patients, and Connie's ward reflects that research in its every detail. The horror is not fantastical. It is procedural and bureaucratic and absolutely recognizable as a form of social control directed with particular force at women, the poor, and people of color.
Throughout the novel, Connie is shown two different futures. The first is the utopian future of Mattapoisett, deliberately contrasted with the present. There children are raised communally, gender has been dissolved, reproduction is managed outside the body and shared equally, and the community maintains itself through consensus rather than hierarchy. Mattapoisett is rendered in enough detail to feel genuinely inhabitable rather than merely wished for, though Piercy is careful to show us its imperfections too. What separates it from the present is not luck or evolution but deliberate and sometimes painful choices, including the surrender of biological motherhood itself, which Piercy presents as both a loss and a liberation.
The dystopian future Connie also glimpses is a hypercapitalist world in which women are surgically modified for pleasure and bred for function. This future appears only briefly but lands with a heavy force. Piercy's warning is that either of these two futures are equally possible, and the present is already tending toward one of them.
Piercy is less interested in time travel as a device than in what Connie's confinement exposes about the violence embedded in systems that decide, on behalf of the powerless, what is real and what is madness. By the novel's end she has taken a drastic, irreversible action to protect the future she has seen, and the narrative does not resolve whether what she has done is heroic or mad.
Throughout the novel, Connie is shown two different futures. The first is the utopian future of Mattapoisett, deliberately contrasted with the present. There children are raised communally, gender has been dissolved, reproduction is managed outside the body and shared equally, and the community maintains itself through consensus rather than hierarchy. Mattapoisett is rendered in enough detail to feel genuinely inhabitable rather than merely wished for, though Piercy is careful to show us its imperfections too. What separates it from the present is not luck or evolution but deliberate and sometimes painful choices, including the surrender of biological motherhood itself, which Piercy presents as both a loss and a liberation.
The dystopian future Connie also glimpses is a hypercapitalist world in which women are surgically modified for pleasure and bred for function. This future appears only briefly but lands with a heavy force. Piercy's warning is that either of these two futures are equally possible, and the present is already tending toward one of them.
Piercy is less interested in time travel as a device than in what Connie's confinement exposes about the violence embedded in systems that decide, on behalf of the powerless, what is real and what is madness. By the novel's end she has taken a drastic, irreversible action to protect the future she has seen, and the narrative does not resolve whether what she has done is heroic or mad.