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    Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel
    Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel
    Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel
    Audiobook14 hours

    Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel

    Written by Marge Piercy

    Narrated by Tanya Eby

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy's landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures-and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before.

    Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity-and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781515979739
    Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel
    Author

    Marge Piercy

    Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen novels, including the national bestsellers Gone to Soldiers, Braided Lives, and Woman on the Edge of Time, seventeen volumes of poetry, and a critically acclaimed memoir, Sleeping with Cats. Born in center-city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time.

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    Reviews for Woman on the Edge of Time

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    • 5/5
      This is my favorite kind of feminist book, akin in many ways to the stories of Octavia Butler and Joanna Russ. Consuelo is a woman living a hopeless life in modern America. Her lover is dead, her child has been taken from her, and there is literally no one alive who respects her. She is mired in a mental hospital, where she begins having visions of the future.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Brutal, frightening and intense, this book is a tough slog only because it's so bleak. Gut wrenching descriptions of mental institutions and of people being abused in them. Is she really seeing into the future or is it just part of her disease? Don't we all crave some glimmering of hope at our most desperate moments?
    • 5/5
      Timely . A.I. Algorithms Facebook
      Piercy saw it coming
      Timely.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Though this novel has more company in making some of its points it still has plenty to say about the complicity of the powerful in the seemingly individual tragedies of the disadvantaged. Connie started her life believing in her own future but at every set back she is not supported but blamed and must go on with fewer resources. Whether it is her ability or her position in the context of the future her connection with a future community becomes her last support. I found the justifications and consequences of her final actions to embody more past to modern notions than modern to future ones.
    • 4/5
      I only read this book, and then only partially was to see how the location of this story, or rather the town in the future was a similar town to the one I spent my high school years, namely Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. So, I skipped 7 chapters and landed on chapter 8 where Mattapoisett figures prominently. When she mentioned the Grange, I knew she got it right. When I lived there (1960-64) the population was 3,000, and now it is 6,000. It's a suburb of New Bedford, but off the beaten path. It still has two churches, Congregational and Catholic. And 34 elective offices, including the Herring Weir Inspector.
    • 3/5
      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. 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 amuesment 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.MB 24-iv-2019
    • 4/5
      This book was a real struggle to read -- as evidenced by the fact that it has taken me most of a year to finish it. The stark presentation of the interaction between the US mental health system of the 1970s, poverty, and generalised racism, sexism, and othering of the mentally ill means this is very confronting. Given this, along with aspects of the unreliable narrator, which makes some of the scenes very difficult to follow, I found it best read in small chunks. For those who like reading the nastier dystopias or gritty modern day realistic literature, this will probably not be so difficult. In other settings, I might have read the horrors experienced by the protagonist, Connie, as artistic licence. But there was nothing here that spoke to me of Connie's experiences as fiction, more that the sequence, the specifics that happen to her as being the fiction. Connie's visions of a utopian future are detailed, and fascinating, with a strong honesty regarding the level of personal and systemic control that needs to be kept to maintain such a system in the face of human greed and other failings. A semi-communist utopia, with minimal personal possessions, temporary artworks, shared means of production coupled with free movement, complex consensus decision making, and an ongoing war somewhere. All this, and her counter vision of a rigid hierarchical and restricted future, are intricately detailed, and masterfully described. Connie is not a protagonist I wanted to identify with. To me, from a different time and place, culturally removed, she is very alien. I comprehend her existence, but I don't understand it; the control exerted over her by the doctors, aided by her brother, terrifies me. This aspect of the story is not SF, it is brutal, and it is honest. This books does a great job of dissecting both a possible future (or two) and a present/past. It works well as an exploration of philosophies about how people work together. Well worth reading once.
    • 3/5
      A scathing critique of psychiatry. Imaginative, thoughtfully written. I wish it hadn't ended so abruptly; I would have gladly followed Connie and Luciente through at least 200 more pages.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful science fiction, one of those novels that blurs mental illness and experiences outside of the norm in this case a visitor from the future. Very bleak in places but an excellent novel.
    • 4/5
      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 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.Read in 2015 for the SFFCat.
    • 5/5
      This book and its narrator captures what it is to be oppressed as a poor woman of color in the United States. And then contrast that with a beautiful egalitarian utopia. And then contrast that again with a horrible corporation-ruled dystopia.The book was written in the 1970s, but nothing about it really feels dated. Our society still treats poor people as subhuman and disposable.The utopia uses gender-neutral pronouns for everyone. Their children are unschooled. Unlike many older works, this isn't full of cringeworthy sexism/racism/homophobia.
    • 5/5
      I need to reread this. I've thought about it often since reading it the first time. I especially always think of Piercy's word "per" as a singular gender neutral third person pronoun whenever I hear myself awkwardly saying "he or she" or (shudder) "they" to mean the same thing.

      I remember loving the story and thinking about how interesting and well-thought out all of the utopian ideas were.

      Aug 2010

      I reread this book hoping for more enjoyment - not that it's worse on the second pass but I got so damn depressed thinking about how our world is really messed up compared to the future Connie visits.

      May 2011

      Reread for the third time. This book makes me so sad. It also makes me want to be a better person. And it makes me wish we had more beauty in our lives, like the people of Mattapoiset do with their celebrations of death, holidays, the way they work, they way they play...
    • 3/5
      I liked it. She vividly portrayed the ways in which women, especially women of color are discounted, I could really feel the anger at times - but Consuela was never a pathetic victim, she was in there fighting, and okay mostly losing, but not giving up. And her visions/fantasies of the future were of a kindlier world, and who doesn't want that. Maybe it was a little heavy handed but I still liked it.
    • 2/5
      The usual preachy, unworkable utopia. Whiney and humorless. Pekins Gilman did this a lot better.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely adore this book because you don't really know if the main character is off her rocker and imagining what is taking place or it's real!!!
    • 2/5
      The first couple of chapters were actually kind of interesting, then when Connie started talking more to the guy from the future, it went downhill fast for me. It was just a bit too strange and I quickly stopped enjoying it.
    • 4/5
      Connie Ramos is a thirty-something Chicano New Yorker who is institutionalized by her niece's pimp because she smashed him in the face (deservedly) with a frying pan. She is perfectly sane, but in the maddeningly primitive mental institutions of the 1970s, nothing she can do will prove this. Connie does, however, have an interesting quirk. She is able to communicate with the future (2137). She clings to this future life and her friends there as a means of trying to escape before the institution doctors use her in a brain control experiment. A very, very good book.
    • 4/5
      It is difficult to review this book without revealing more than one should know before reading it. Stasia sent me this quote from wikipedia which sums it up well:"Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of Utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk."I found the book extremely intense, fascinating and compelling. I also found it often exasperating and difficult to read at times necessitating periodic breaks calm down, relax and to assimilate what I had read. This is a book that invites discussion among people who can argue without getting angry with each other. I would even suggest that it should be discussed in sections as the group is reading—it would be difficult to discuss it all at once.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 3/5
      This is a story that tackled an ambitious set of themes: environmentalism, feminism, child rearing, treatment of the mentally ill, socialism, criminal justice, war, racial prejudice, genetic engineering...whew, and in just 376 pages! The basic premise of the plot is that Consuela Ramos is a woman with some history of violence who ends up in an infamous New York mental institution. She has episodes that, from her perspective, involve her traveling in time psychically to about 150 years in the future to a culture that has tackled many of the afore-mentioned issues head-on, and she is given some hints that her life might be somewhat pivotal in determining if that future actually comes to pass. Piercy is coy with the reader about whether these episodes are real or whether they are mental breaks.To some extent, it was a story whose ambition exceeded its grasp. While many of her thoughts are interesting...even fascinatingly novel (men taking temporary hormone treatments so they can experience the mother/child bonding of breast feeding)...there's an overarching ADD quality to the story line as Piercy tries to keep so many balls in the air. Moreover, it's difficult to read this as a quality example of any subgenre of science fiction.We can disregard technological science fiction right away; Piercy is too careless of the implications of future technology to make it satisfying. Piercy does make an attempt at an alternate futures story. The future characters state it explicitly, "...at certain cruxes of history...forces are in conflict....Alternate futures are equally or almost equally probable...We are struggling to exist." Unfortunately, she doesn't remain focused on it and is too vague in presenting the cause and effect that will make one future or another come true. Further, she commits the cardinal sin of introducing the Grandfather Paradox and then simply dropping further consideration with it unresolved. At best, we have to ignore this subplot and consider the time travel as merely a weak mechanism that allows Piercy to present her society.We're left with its social science fiction persona, the cautionary tale vs. utopian vision aspect. Piercy tackles this with gusto, presenting a culture that is focused upon erasing all the ills of our society. As I mentioned above, I found some of her visions interesting (even if they caused me to squirm a bit), particularly in regard to erasing the gender gap and elevating the "female" in our society. Quite frankly, I would have enjoyed this book quite a bit more if she had let most of her other subjects go and explored this a bit more. Yet, even this aspect of the book palled eventually because that society began to feel like the popular image of Michael Metelica's Brotherhood of the Spirit rather than some living and breathing society. It was as if Piercy took all the social dreams from the Summer of Love (1967) through when she wrote it (1976) and packaged them up in an Aquarian Age utopia rather than a logical extension of our future.If this doesn't work well as science fiction...if we take away that veneer...what do we have left? The answer is an indictment of our treatment of the have nots in our society, especially the treatment of the mentally ill. This theme is actually the bulk of the book's content and it's a forceful polemic against the warehousing, the lack of treatment and the basic abrogation of rights that exists in this area. Piercy made a good choice in her protagonist in this regard; Connie is a sympathetic character: poor, minority, likable, well-intentioned, unlucky, and mistreated by her family. And yet, for all that we do like her, she is what they say she is: violent, irresponsible and addicted. Some healing is appropriate. This aspect of the story becomes a grim pounding after a while (cut half of it and use those pages to fill in the gaps in the future story is my advice), but it is effective. In the end, I think this is a story you might want to read to get a flavor of that late 60s/early 70s thinking about our society and utopian possibilities. In that regard, it's rather interesting. However, if your goal is just a good science fiction book, regardless of any historical context, then you might want to pass this one by.
    • 5/5
      The narrator, Connie, is wrongly committed to a mental institution but escapes (whether really or only by way of an extended fantasy of escape) to a utopian future world. The utopian vision may be problematic in some ways (that's the problem with utopias) but this is a masterful piece of work. Reminiscent of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but much, much better.
    • 4/5
      I kind of hate Marge Piercy's idea of utopia, with its' androgynous people, birth machines, anomie, and cultural appropriation. I did not find her vision nearly radical enough. Yes, the people are now dedicated to restoring the planet, but they still see it as something to exploit for human interests. They still tamper with genetics, watch television, and domesticate rivers. They might not be greedy, but they're still basically self-centered and individualistic. The writing is also at its worst in these scenes. It is not very convincing. As in many utopias, the inhabitants lack conflict with one another (for the most part), and are just simply too aware of their own culture's beliefs and attitudes. Generally speaking when someone internalizes a value they aren't going to have an easy time articulating it, but that isn't the case for people here.On the other hand, I love most everything else about the book. All the scenes outside of the utopian future are excellent, and so are many of the author's insights. Her writing is very strong, and the conclusion was my favorite part of the whole book.
    • 4/5
      After smashing her niece's pimp in the face with a bottle, Connie Ramos is declared violently insane. Trapped in the terrible tedium of the asylum ward, Connie, as a receiver, is able to escapes via her connection with Luciente to the year 2137. She sees first hand a utopian society, in which division of gender and race is nonexistent and people live in peace and connection with the earth and its animals. Meanwhile, in her own time, the doctors have signed her up for a dangerous experiment that could sever her from herself forever. Connie is clearly sane, much more so than the many people on the outside, from the doctors (who see themselves as heroic gods) to her niece (who lets herself be beaten, abused and used over and over again) to her brother (who wishes to control everyone and everything around him). However, it's never really clear whether this utopia she visits is a real place or not. Piercy presents the time traveling in such a straightforward manner and the future in such rich detail, that one at first takes it for granted that its real, just as Connie does. Real or not real doesn't really matter, however, for this vision of the future presents Connie with a different way of seeing not only the world around her, but also herself full of struggles and suffering. It also gives her the strength to fight back.
    • 4/5
      I quite enjoyed this book, despite some of its darker themes. I think the portions about time travel were reasonable, non-sterotypical (rockets and lasers and all) and did not require me to suspend my belief to enjoy the book.
    • 5/5
      Influenced my work. Utopia and Dystopia all in one story.
    • 4/5
      Piercy presents us with multiple worlds of utopia and dystopia which are both disorientating and fascinating to the reader. A really important feminist utopian novel which explores some key issues not only of its time, but of times before and after it. The unlikely heroine of the book 'travels' between times and realities to discover a future which is the complete opposite of her expectations. Piercy does not present us with a future of space crafts and techno-centric society. Rather, a wonderful mix of the rural, old and familiar is entwined with progressive thoughts on society and technology.This book is full of wonderful ideas and innovative style. However, it is a challenge to read and can demand a little too much patience from the reader. It can be read as somewhat of a bleak work, but there is beauty and hope in there too.A rewarding, if not somewhat challenging read.
    • 3/5
      I read this when it first came out several millenia ago. I was working in a rape crisis centre at the time and was immersed in the women's movement in every aspect of my life. This was a very popular book among my friends, and I, being a long time science fiction and fantasy fan, was pleased to have a chance to read it and other sf with feminist themes. The actual book, however, does not stand out in my memory. It didn't move me terribly much as a story, though I liked it well enough to finish it. Still, it was important to have these ideas represented in fiction, and to have a chance to envision the world in these ways. In that sense it is historically important for me, if not in the sense of one of my favourite books.