Woman on the Edge of Time

"It’s about a 37-year-old called Connie Ramos who starts communicating with a character from the (or a) future called Luciente. Luciente comes to Connie’s present but then takes Connie to her future, where people live in rural communities, make all their own food, bring up their children communally and have polyamorous relationships and a tribal identity. Connie gets put in an asylum, not because of these visions, but because she gets in a fight – she’s from this very poor underworld – and her visions of the future become related to what’s happening to her in the asylum. There’s this treatment they’re testing out in the asylum where they insert a device into the patient’s brain to control their emotions by flicking a switch. At the point Connie is operated on she goes into a completely different future. Once her present becomes unbearable, the future itself becomes equally horrific and she projects into this other future where humans are used for organ harvests and the rich live to 200 and the “duds” die early. This future’s malevolently technocratic, and the apotheosis of controlling technology. Connie realises that her time is the point at which these two futures are being arbitrated. What’s really brilliant about this novel is that it could obviously all be in her head, about the way we create our own realities and how our sense of reality is totally determined by our own mental states. But it could be that Piercy is saying that this is possible – it is true that through the actions of a particular time, different futures occur."