Woman on the Edge of Time
Marge Piercy's 1976 novel is a foundational work of feminist science fiction. Connie Ramos, a poor Chicana woman wrongly committed to a Manhattan psychiatric hospital, begins receiving visits from Luciente, a person from a 2137 society called Mattapoisett. The future Luciente shows her is a small-scale, ecological, gender-fluid, communal world where parenting is shared and violence has been ritualized out of everyday life. As Connie's situation in the hospital worsens, including the prospect of experimental brain surgery, she also glimpses a second future, a corporatized, hierarchical nightmare. The novel pioneers ideas about non-binary pronouns, communal childrearing, and ecological cities that have only sharpened in relevance. It is brutal in its present-day chapters and luminous in its future ones. A book that helped shape the language of feminist utopia.
What you might want to know about Woman on the Edge of Time
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Latina woman committed to a psychiatric ward in 1970s New York glimpses a possible future, and a much darker one.
Woman on the Edge of Time was written by Marge Piercy.
Woman on the Edge of Time is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
