I wasn’t going to write about Woman on the Edge of Time (1976, USA). It’s an uncomfortable book to read, especially since some things have improved a great deal, in some respects, since it was written. But it’s an important feminist science fiction novel, and the feminist near-utopia it presents is an interesting creation worthy of study, and, well, we should all read more feminist science fiction anyway.
Connie, Consuela Ramos, is a poor Latina woman living in New York. Her niece is a sex worker, abused and misused by her boyfriend/pimp but incapable of recognising it, and her brother, a successful businessman, would sooner pretend his sister does not exist. Connie has had good times, but each one has been torpedoed by a man, or by the system because she does not have a man.
One day, Connie meets a person, Luciente, whose gender she cannot immediately determine, who claims to come from the future, and who has a psychic link with Connie. This link allows them to visit Connie in their time, or bring Connie forward to the future they inhabit. Much of the novel is taken up with Connie’s visits to Luciente’s world.
But things don’t go so well for Connie in 1970s New York. After a violent incident with her niece, actually instigated by the niece’s pimp, Connie is remanded to a mental institution on the instruction of her brother. These sections of the novel are pure One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962, USA) by Ken Kesey — staff not trained to deal with their charges, a regimen of abuse and neglect, and a level of psychiatric care more common to the 1920s than the 1970s. US state psychiatric care in the 1970s was hardly state of the art, but as depicted in the novel it does indeed read like it belongs several decades earlier. They say that when a cure for syphilis was discovered, 90% of the mental institutions in the UK closed. The mental institution described in Woman on the Edge of Time feels like one of those.
It doesn’t help when it transpires some of the patients at the institution are used, without their consent, as subjects in an experiment. Experiments involving brain surgery. This is pure Mengele territory, and I find it hard to believe a novel written in the 1970s was unaware of Mengele and his reputation. To suggest the same occurred at a US mental institution is not wholly credible…
And yet, the future Piercy describes, the future so many commentators mistakenly describe as “female only”, is far more plausible than many other science fictional feminist utopias (I’m reminded of Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground, in which the hill women have the ability to fly; it’s a great novel — well, fix-up — I recommend it). Piercy’s future world is truly feminist in as much as it doesn’t distinguish between male and female — in fact, Luciente, who Connie assumes is female, proves to be male. And so for Luciente’s world, in which people’s roles in society are not determined by gender or sex, in which sex does not determine gender, and which seems prosperous, technologically proficient and equitable — and yet is not quite as happy as advertised.
I wrote above that some things have changed for the better since Woman on the Edge of Time was published, but perhaps that’s not entirely true. Institutional care has, I would like to think, improved a great deal since Piercy’s novel, and had done even before it was written, despite various western governments’ move towards “care in the community”. Of course, Connie is Latina and her treatment is deeply racist, and that’s more likely the explanation for her experiences than would be the case in a European country. She is, after all, not the only non-white “patient” to suffer as she does.
I’ve been collecting books published by The Women’s Press and labelled as “science fiction” for many years. Between 1983 and 1992, they published around sixty books — novels, collections, one anthology, and a couple of non-fiction works. Not all of then were especially good, but their list did include some excellent science fiction novels, including Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy won the Clarke Award in 1993 for Body of Glass (1992, USA), AKA He, She and It, but it is not Body of Glass that’s still in print but Woman on the Edge of Time. That certainly suggests it’s considered a more important work.
And I would concur. For all that it’s somewhat dated. But good books set at a particular time, irrespective of when they were written, embody that time. Woman on the Edge of Time does that, the credibility of the sections set in a mental institution notwithstanding. But its future feminist utopia is both appealing and plausible, and that I think is the real strength, and appeal, of the novel, and why it is so highly regarded.
