Woman on the Edge of Time – Marge Piercy

Blazing a trail for books like The Handmaid’s Tale and published nearly 10 years before was Women on the Edge of Time.

Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to an androgynous young woman named Luciente. She realizes that Luciente is from a future world in which a number of goals of the political and social agenda of the late sixties and early seventies radical movements have been fulfilled. Environmental pollution, homophobia, racism, phallogocentrism, class-subordination, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism no longer exist in the agrarian, communal community of Mattapoisett. The death penalty, however, continues to exist (“We don’t think it’s right to kill (…). Only convenient.”), as does war…