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. ( )

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 ovation from me. ( )

I read this before, many years ago. It was so well worth reading again. It's a scary window on the way that the mentally ill were treated in the 60s. So Reagan came and turned them all out on the street. They're not on Thorazine, but their illness is not addressed any better. ( )

I love this book so much. It perfectly displays what I as a feminist am fighting for. It shows a beautiful utopia (not a classic utopia, there are problems and such, but classic utopias never really work now do they?) I've read it over and over whenever I feel down. It's such a beautiful vision. ( )

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 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. ( )