Woman on the Edge of Time

Great world building. Particularly like how Piercy develops the vernacular for different groups and how that reflects the underlying forces and most importantly principles that those groups shift around. Sometimes I feel points are repeated and whilst there has been a lot of work to flesh out this world, sometimes the pages are busy with description and dialogue rather than momentum. The presumably expected crescendo toward the end therefore doesn't land so loudly for me. Protagonist is great, love her passion and inner world, felt fresh to be placed alongside her in a sci fi context.

This book had the tools to change sci-fi and feminist literature, however ended up not delivering to its full potential, the last 4 chapters were missing 400 hundred pages of content, exploring more the unsaid and dissecting every possible future. Still a really good book, deeply poetic and brutally real. The version i got from a charity shop had dissembled throughout the reading, what i found quite simbolic.

This book presents an interesting problem. It is a great book filled with fantastic writing, engaging characters, discussions of things that matter, and so many parts that lead to a great work of speculative fiction - if not the most cheerful (parts of this book are tough reads and intentionally so). It is from 1976 and this is first time I have read it so many of the themes of the book I have run into elsewhere and may well have become tropes based on this book - what came first right? That made it hard for me to evaluate. I recommend it, highly but it also seemed so familiar that at times that familiarity took me out of the story, frustrating. My problems aside this is a great book.

2.5

Brutal and crucial portrayal of American eugenics with extreme compassion and respect for its victims.

Absolutely necessary read to understand the need for reproductive justice in terms of both the right to abortion and the right to reproduce (in light of how race and class interact with these rights). I've worked at a sexual health clinic and on a psych ward before, and I am so glad to have read this book because it helped me understand how the healthcare system's roots in eugenics impact these practices today. At odds is the utopia's method for controlling reproduction; I really like theory about removing the importance of genes from our cultural understanding of things in order to take power from racism, but the utopia's control of how and when people can have babies struck me as in opposition to the novel's overall anti-eugenics stance. Maybe I'm missing something though.

Can't give a number rating because even though the book deals with gender in a way that is anti-essentialist, creative, and keenly aware of how gender has been used to oppress, Piercy is a TERF (at least as of 2017, and I can't find an apology or disavowal anywhere, please share if it's out there). Super f***ing disappointing.

Life for Connie has been a series of unlucky events that successively knocked her lower and lower into poverty, violence and depression, now leaving her afraid and on the edge of sanity. While at a mental hospital she's connected through time to the 22nd century. In this future people still mend the harm humanity has caused the earth, but live happily in small hippy-like communities organised around principles of self realization, sexual freedom and sustainability. Connie has a hard time comparing her present and this utopia, but by spending time with the friends she makes there, she slowly grows more resilient.

Brilliant for its time (written in 1976), and still so resonant today. The types of oppression (sexism, racism, prejudice towards mental illness, the capitalism-driven carelessness of pharmacy/technology) the protagonist Connie experiences in the 70ies are still very much part of our present. I liked how Piercy doesn't spoon-feed you all the connections you can make (while she definitely does spoon-feed you some). The book leaves you with lots of thoughts about injustices generated by systems and also inspiration for a future we could and should want to build.

4.5

Ultimately, I finished this book with a sense of mild dissatisfaction. Much of the writing I liked, yet it felt very heavy handed in places and over-long.

This book is a hot mess.