Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

No one listens to her side of the story.Ĭonnie has been contacted by an androgynous young person called Luciente from the year 2137. Some of the more harrowing aspects of the mental hospital are dated, it's true, but Connie's situation is certainly not outlandish or science fictional: she's a woman who has been failed by the healthcare system, failed by the police and the foster care system, and horrifically abused by a hateful misogynist. We haven't even gotten to the sci-fi part, and already Connie's life is a dystopian nightmare. The authorities believe that Connie attacked him, given her history of mental illness, and no one will treat her serious injuries from the fight. And in one of the most nauseating fight scenes in all of science fiction, Dolly's boyfriend beats Connie unconscious, forces his girlfriend to lie to the police, and has Connie placed in forced detention in a mental institution. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, $13, AmazonĪt the start of the novel, Connie is trying to protect her pregnant niece, Dolly, from an abusive boyfriend, who wants Dolly to have a back alley abortion. She's stuck in a labyrinth of welfare and custody battles with no way out. Her husband is dead, her only daughter has been taken by the state, and years of struggling with mental illness have left her impoverished. She's in her mid-thirties and just barely scraping by. That's where Consuelo Ramos lives, in the 'present day' of New York in the '70s. The 'dystopian' part of the book takes place firmly in the present. Our main character discovers that she can communicate with a figure from the year 2137, from a world without sexism or racism, where gender is fluid and everyone recycles. Woman on the Edge of Time is not exactly a new novel and it's not exactly a dystopian novel: it was first published in 1976, and the speculative future it depicts is a good old fashioned utopia.

We've seen futures where women lose all their rights, futures where police states rule with iron fists, futures where rebels are imprisoned against their will for telling the truth-and as long as we're bringing back all the dystopian classics, it's time for a second look at Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. 1984 is back on the bestseller list and it seems like new dystopia novels are hitting the shelves every other day.

Between The Handmaid's Taleand The Hunger Games and the current state of politics in America, we're in a bit of a dystopian renaissance.