Marge Piercy

Woman on the Edge of Time is an excellent and perhaps depressing novel that presents dystopia and utopia side by side, drawing on the realities of life in a patriarchal, capitalist society in the 1970s to spin a picture of what a better society might look like - as well as a glimpse of how things might get even worse.

Connie, our protagonist, is a middle-aged woman down on her luck who ends up in a mental institution after a false accusation of violent behaviour by her niece's pimp. She is selected for a mind control experiment dressed up as therapy, but what the doctors don't know is that Connie has the ability to travel forward in time with the help of a future-dwelling woman called Luciente. Through Connie's visits, we see how our society could become the utopia in which Luciente lives.

Reading this in 2023, it's quite dismaying how little society seems to have progressed since Connie's reality. Yet it was wonderful to read about a utopian world in which nature, found family and art are prioritised over profit, hoarding and mass destruction. I enjoyed Connie's visits to the future, even if a lot of those scenes were written purely to show us how that world works; I didn't feel that I suffered from the lack of plot. The reality in which Connie tries to escape the mental institution offered plenty of plot for me, down to the final twist (which I didn't mind that much). I don't think I'll forget this novel in a hurry; I only wish we can one day work towards our own utopia in my lifetime.… (mer)

As usual, Marge Piercy is full of interesting ideas. In this book she explores our relationship to technology, as individuals, as.communities and as a society. Her primary question concerns the notion of humanity. What does it mean to be human? What are the essential attributes? What does it mean when acknowledged human beings don't have those qualities, vut cyborgs do? What are the benefits and risks of merging the biological with the technological? Great questions for our current moment. Unfortunately Piercy ' s writing falls far short of the expectations set by her framing of her subject. It's sentimental, trite, even juvenile at many times, making it hard to get through and distracting the reader from the interesting problems Piercy ' s presented us.… (mer)