Space Station Mir

These are the last three books we read for my Utopian Science Fiction class, I highly recommend Woman on the Edge of Time and less so Wild Seed , I was less taken with Patternmaster . 15. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy What really drew me in about Woman on the Edge of Time was the social status of the protagonist. Connie is an older, minority (Latina) woman who has been hospitalized repeatedly for mental instability. She is essentially the lowest of the low on society's totem pole. And it is amazing what this means society can do to her, all sorts of oppression, down to the grossest of experiments and most invasive procedures can be inflicted on her because of her inferior social position. And yet, Connie has access to another world, a world where the social distinctions that oppress her; race, gender, class, even her mental condition (that only questionably exists in the first place) have been eradicated. Mattapoisett is a town on this new Earth, that has evolv...

For my Utopian Science Fiction class, we just finished reading Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. We have also recently read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Triton by Samuel R. Delaney, and The Female Man by Joanna Russ. The following post looks at the use of language and gender in the utopian society (Mattapoisett) in Woman on the Edge of Time and compares to the other books. Connie, an older Mexican-American woman in a mental hospital, is the protagonist from our time (the 1960s) and Luciente is a woman from the future who is able to mentally link with her and allow her to see her time. In class, we discussed terms having to do with feeling such as "bottomed" (sad), "feathered" (happy), and "bumped" (frustrated/angry). We observed that these terms feel more physical in nature, rather than abstract like our current terms and what this means about the difference between our society and Mattapoisett. If we accept the premise that these ...