Stefen’s Bookclub – October

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

I was quite surprised to have to opportunity to put this book on our reading list. It’s a book I’ve read about, since Marge Piercy often appears in discussions of feminist science fiction alongside her contemporaries, Johanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin and Alice Bradley Sheldon. Finding works by these women has not always been easy, particularly in book club quantities and at reasonable prices. The Gollancz SF Masterworks range has allowed us to read LeGuin and a selection of Sheldon’s Tiptree stories, and I was wondering if I might be able get copies of Russ’ The Female Man, when while perusing a catalogue of forthcoming titles I saw something I was not expecting. Random House UK were releasing a reprint of Marge Piercy’s 1976 book Woman on the Edge of Time. The book had been pretty much unavailable and out of print for nearly twenty years, so I’d never seriously considered it. A few e-mails later and I’d secured my copies.

What we’ll be reading is a book that starts in the now and reaches forward to possible futures. Connie Ramos is a woman dealing with some of the worst things her society can offer. Drugs, violence, poverty and injustice have left her committed to a mental institution. While there she is contacted by someone who claims to be from the future; a future that Connie will be instrumental in enabling or preventing. The job of this time traveller, who calls herself Luciente is to show Connie what the results of Connie’s actions will be and the other possible futures she could cause. The butterfly effect of chaos theory is well known, but how would you react if someone told you that you were the butterfly? What if they told you at a time and in a place where you questioned and doubted your own perceptions? Is Connie a madwoman, broken by a brutal world, or a butterfly whose wings will change the world.