As I sat down to write this post  I was trying to figure out what topic to write about as a lot happened in this section. The alternate future she connected to, the death of jackrabbit, the war she imagined she was a part of in the future, her change in behavior once they removed the device from her head, or the brother who fills me with anger. All of these could bring solid discussion, but I have to go with the moment that has stuck with me since i read it, the ending.

When we first met Connie she was a very simple woman, trying to survive every day and carrying all the pain and suffering she was dealt with. She was jobless, living on welfare, a person with no reason to exist. When she was put into the mental institution, she became another reject of society. She was a person I did not want to see a book written about. That changed as i began reading this last section.

Connie became a strong character the moment they removed the device from her head. She was filled with the burning desire to fight against those who were oppressing her.

“War, she thought, I’m at war. No more fantasies, no more hopes. War.” (Piercy, 332)

This change in her was surprising and pleasant. Finally Connie know what she wants to do, what she has to do. She will no longer accept the situation she has been given and will do what she can to get out of it. Her attempts failed and she is left with no choice, but to fight the establishment directly. When Connie had taken the poison from her brothers workplace I was unsure what her motivations were. As she poured the poison into the coffee, it became clear that she was literally at war and was killing her enemy, the doctors.

As Connie sat down on her bed to await the consequences of her actions, Connie’s story ends with no explanation as to what will become of her. The next  chapter opens up with the text from the doctors notes detailing from their view what we have been told over the course of the book. Its not until the last line that we learn what happened to her.

“There were one hundred thirteen more pages. They all followed Connie back to Rockover.” (Piercy, 376)

It is after this line that I Realized that Connie is one of the bravest characters I have ever read about. Connie knew what would happen and she accepted it. She knew that she would be unable to connect with Luciente, yet she accepted what she had to do. Connie was prepared to spend the rest of her life with no freedom in order to protect those she loved. She selflessly sacrificed herself for the good of everyone else. It takes an incredible amount of strength in order to commit oneself to a lifetime of imprisonment. I respect Connie for her courage, for doing what was right. Everyone will see her as that crazy woman who murdered the doctors that were trying to help her. They will probably mistreat her and give no thoughts to a  psychopath. Connie accepted this and became the hero of her time.

The book is finally getting interesting. We vaguely learn why it is that the people of the future are contacting people from the past. According to them, their world, the future they live in, is in danger. They don’t explicitly state this, but they imply that there are several realities fighting for existence and they want their world to come true.

“at certain cruxes of history . . . forces are in conflict. Technology is imbalanced. Too few have too much power. Alternate futures are equally or almost equally probable . . . and that affects the . . . shape of time.” (Piercy, 189)

It leaves one wondering why would they contact someone like Connie. A person in a mental institution who has no power, even over herself. When Connie asks about other people from the present that they have contacted they mention That they have mostly consisted of women and women in correction facilities/ mental institutions (Piercy, 188). While Connie was not in a mental institution when she was first contacted it shows that these people need to be in some kind of mental state in order to receive contact from those in the future. It could be that they must be weak minded, or possibly have gone through great turmoils in their life as evident by Connie’s history.

You would think that this leaves their options limited in who they can contact, but they state that they have been trying to contact people who are at the bottom of society.

“The powerful don’t make revolutions” (Piercy 190)

They can’t directly interfere with the past, but they can influence people to take action to fight against those that control them, before they gain too much control.

Once Connie mentions what the doctors had done to Alice they reveal some more information. Apparently the actions of these doctors are the first steps to the world that they wish to avoid. They want to avoid the power that control of the masses will grant to the few. Before hand the doctors work was a miscellaneous background detail, something that was not central to the story. This revelation puts the doctors research as a focal point for the entire story. While Connie is unable to actually change anything directly, what the doctors accomplish with these patients is important to the future.

After Connie’s operation we are more clearly able to see just how evil their work is for the common person. Connie becomes a vegetable unable to do anything for herself and not wanting to do anything. she is kept alive by the actions of those around her and it seems that the doctors don’t care about what they did to her as they proceed forward with plans to perform a similar operation to Alice. Skip was another one of their victims and while he did not become a mindless robot, he lost what made him Skip as noticed by Connie (Piercy, 264). This change is seen as a positive outcome by the doctors even allowing him to go home to visit his parents. What they could not see was that this change destroyed Chip, allowing him to kill himself. The death of a patient who they were trying to improve should be a deterrent to future experiments, but these doctors only see these people as experiments and Chip was a failed experiment. The work of the doctors is not to the benefit of the patients.

(Im aware this is late, but better late than never.)

As the story progresses the reader learns more about the world of the future. A beautiful world is painted, one without the problems and pains of Connie’s world, very much like a Utopian society, only without the false perfections. Everyone is unique and accepted for being so. As a person from this time, a lot of what they do seems odd, but trying to understand it and reading about the issues it does away with, it becomes easy to accept it all. Except for Connie.

In chapter 5 Connie visits the place where the children of the future are born, in a lab being incubated outside of a woman’s womb. Their reasoning is that it allows them to breed diversity and do away with racism while still maintaining racial diversity. Another reason is that in an effort to achieve equality among the human population, both male and females had to be equal, and the only way to do that was to do away with biological differences. One of those differences being a woman’s ability to give birth. Connie also learns about the three mother system with which the children of this place are raised. All of this is alien to Connie and she does not agree with it.

For every explanation that the people of the future give, Connie argues against. Connie continues to think in the way of someone from the present who cannot see any other way to live their life. As a disclaimer, I am also someone from the present, so some of what will be written here may be biased. on the last page of the chapter (Piercy 98) Connie begins to think about her daughter as well as expressing her thoughts on the futures way of living. She cannot understand how it is that those people can be mothers when they have never raised a child from their wombs, “How could anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who has never borne a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child.” She begins to hate them for living their life without the pain and suffering that Connie went through her entire life, for being happier than her. Connie does not see that this world is a better world to live in even if some things are sacrificed to achieve it.

Later on Connie witnesses the name day of one of the children of the future. There she learns the risk that the child will go through in order to become an adult. The society of the future has learned that this is the best way for the development of a person, to go from child to adult and have accepted it as a rite of passage. Connie continues to view this event as barbaric. To her, a child should not be allowed to risk their life for independence, but to them, it must be done.

In the rest of the chapters, Connie is always questioning these things with a sense of disdain, Thinking of these people as mad. Its not until she sees her daughter Angelina (Piercy 133) that her mood changes. Connie was jealous, angry that these people have a better life than her and none of her worries, but when she sees her “daughter” she accepts it, “For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena”. Here her “daughter” can live happily and better than she ever would have in the world she was born.

The opening pages of Woman On The Edge Of Time thrust the reader into a traumatic event for a Consuelo Ramos who also goes by the name of Connie. For a science fiction novel, you would not expect such a book to start off with a terrible real life situation. It sets the life for the protagonist Connie, which is one of hardship and misery. This is further reinforced by the second chapter where the reader learns of all the difficulty Connie has had in her life, and it is a long list. An abusive husband, losing a loved one in prison, losing her child because of a mistake, spending time in an insane asylum and others. Her life has consisted of being treated unfairly, dealing with terrible people and just bad luck. It makes one wonder how anyone could live such a life. All of these events make it easy to sympathize with Connie. A woman who right off the start of the story is at the lowest point in her life as she is being thrown into another insane asylum after receiving a beating from her niece’s pimp. Its a sad feeling reading about this woman’s life and the only thing that makes it possible to continue reading is the requirement to do so, as well as the involvement of the character known as Luciente.

Just wondering how it is that Luciente will make this story a science fiction story is enough of a drive to read through all the terrible events in Connie’s life. There is also a desire to see thing turn around for Connie. Its a cliché for a character to be nothing in the beginning, but through the course of the story become stronger and be able to handle their past problems. Its overused because it works well, everyone wants to see how the protagonist will turn things around and conquer their past issues. I don’t think that will happen exactly like that here, but there is a desire to see Connie pull herself from the deep hole she is in. When Connie first entered the future there was hope that here she would be able to better herself, physically and mentally, but Luciente states that she is not actually in the future and she cannot be improved physically, as when Connie was eating (Piercy, 70). This dashed the hope for Connie to get better. This won’t be an underdog story, but then what will it be about?

These first few chapters just state the point that Connie is doing terribly and is doing worse as she is thrown into an insane asylum. It does introduce the future setting through Luciente, but it seems like a minor thing compared to everything else that is happening in Connie’s life. It makes one wonder why the author made Connie’s life so terrible. These things do make Connie the person she is, but its hard to read about it all and be reminded consistently as one can get angry and depressed reading this. I am hoping the rest of the book goes more into the science fiction element.