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By Root 527 0

Such an interpretation undercuts the entire book. If Connie is insane, her struggles to escape from the institution must be viewed in an entirely different light from that in which the author puts them, and the doctors, the pimp, and the indifferent family are somewhat justified in their callous treatment. Other reviewers did not see Connie as insane but took Luciente and her troupe to be a pointless exercise in “science fiction,” an exercise that should have no place in a piece of social realism. But Piercy is not that stupid. If she had intended a realistic novel she would have written one. Woman on the Edge of Time is a utopia, with all the virtues and shortcomings of the form, and many of the things reviewers found irksome are indigenous to the genre rather than the author.

By utopia, I mean books such as Morris’s News from Nowhere, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Hudson’s A Crystal Age, or even Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways. These differ greatly from plot-centred otherworld fantasies such as Tolkien’s and though they may share some elements with “science fiction,” this category is too broad for them. The books I’ve mentioned all send an emissary from an oppressive contemporary society into the future as a sort of tourist-journalist, to check out improved conditions and report back. Such books are not really about the hero’s adventures, though a love affair of some sort is usually thrown in to sweeten the didactic pill. The real hero is the future society; the reader is intended to comparison-shop in company with the time-traveller, questioning the invariably polite inhabitants and grumbling over disconcerting details. The moral intent of such fables is to point out to us that our own undesirable conditions are not necessary: if things can be imagined differently, they can be done differently.

Hence the inevitable long-winded conversations in which traveller and tour guide, in this case, Connie and Luciente, plod through the day-to-day workings of their societies. What about sewage disposal? birth control? ecology? education? Books of this sort always contain conversations like this, and it is to Piercy’s credit that she has given us a very human and rather grouchy traveller and a guide who sometimes loses her temper. The world of the future depicted here is closest in spirit perhaps to Morris’s. It’s a village economy, with each village preserving the ethnic flavour of some worthy present-day minority: American Indian, American Black, European Jewish (suburban WASP is not represented). It is, however, racially mixed, sexually equal, and ecologically balanced. Women have “given up” childbirth in order that men won’t regret having given up power, and children are educated more or less communally, with a modified apprentice system. There’s quite a lot of advanced bio-feedback, and instant communication through “kenners,” which is uncomfortably reminiscent of such silliness as Dick Tracy’s two-way wristwatch radios. But they do have communal “fooders” and, I’m happy to note, dishwashers.

Reading utopias is addictive—I found myself skipping through some perfectly acceptable passages about electric shock treatments and visiting hours at the asylum to find out what the inhabitants of Mattapoisett do about breastfeeding (both sexes indulge; men get hormone shots), about motherhood (bottle babies, elective “mothers,” production in balance with nature’s capacity to support it, adolescent separation rituals), about criminals (if incorrigible they’re executed because no one wants to be a prison guard), even about what they use to mulch cabbages. Writing utopias is addictive too, and Piercy expends a good deal of energy trying to get every last detail in, to get it right, and to make rather too sure we get the point.

Numerous dangers await the author of a utopia. For one thing, inhabitants of utopias somehow cannot help coming across as slightly sanctimonious and preachy; they’ve been like that since Thomas More. And in addition all utopias suffer from the reader’s secret conviction that a perfect world would be dull, so Piercy is