I had never heard of this book prior to seeing it on the table in Waterstones, but one look at the tagline ‘The Classic Feminist Science Fiction Novel’ and it was in my hand on the way to the checkout. Written in 1976, Piercy tells the story of Connie, a Latina woman in her mid-thirties, living in New York, who is committed to a mental institution following a fight with her niece’s pimp. While there she is visited in her sleep by Luciente, a figure from 150 years in the future, who tells and shows Connie the utopian society they live in. Later on, after Connie undergoes electric shook treatment, she begins to visit the dystopian equivalent of Luciente’s community.

Find this and more reviews on my blog!

First of all, I’m going to talk about the utopia that Piercy envisions. Connie’s experiences of this utopia in contrast with her own day-to-day life make up the bulk of the novel, and are clearly a priority for Piercy. In Piercy’s vision of the future, humanity lives in small villages where work and responsibilities are shared between everyone according to their own skillset and needs. There is no ownership or capitalism; there is no marriage or monogamous culture; there is no childbirth or nuclear family structure and, therefore, no inequality between (or even significant distinction between) genders. ‘Per’ (short for ‘person’) is the universal pronoun. Scientific advances mean that children are conceived and grown outside of the human body, giving each person complete choice in their involvement with the raising of children.

For me, the stand-out feature of Piercy’s ideal is that it is an intersectional feminist utopia. We see in Connie’s story how it is not just her gender but her race, her class and her mental health that shape her life and experiences. In the future, therefore, there are no gender roles, no class structure, and no racial inequality (while still maintaining cultural differences that are celebrated). There is still anger, sadness and depression, but these are seen as natural parts of the human experience, and people are allowed and expected to take whatever time or actions are needed to come to terms with and rebalance their emotions.

The dystopian future Connie visits is not developed anywhere near as much as the utopia, but in many ways we don’t need it to. Women have become property, the earth is polluted beyond repair, and the class divide is both a physical and metaphorical separation in society. More than the utopian society, this future is extrapolated very directly from Connie’s own life, and as her dreams, reality and nightmares become more interwoven, we as the reader start doubting Connie’s reliability as a narrator.

As you get further towards the end, it becomes more and more ambiguous as to how much of the story is the ‘truth’ and how much is Connie’s own visions and thoughts. I couldn’t put it down for the last hundred pages or so, desperate to find out exactly what was going and never quite getting the answers I wanted. The plot remained open-ended, but the message did not. If we, as a society, do not make an active and concerted effort to establish equality and freedom in every sense of the word, we will not notice the walls closing in until it is too late. The fact that this book was written over forty years ago with the message ringing just as true today is not only testament to Peircy’s writing, but also to how little progress has actually been made.