Suzette H. reviewed on 12/24/2009

I read this book first over 20 years ago in a 20th Century Literature class in college. It has remained anovel I remember, but not with great fondness. I am a feminist and a reader and an avid reader (and occasional critic) of science fiction. My first quibble with Piercy's text is that it felt as if, having decided to write a science fiction utopian novel, she also decided to read nothing of the genre she was throwing herself into. Therefore those portions of the novel that take place in the futuristic Utopia (and distopia), feel very "sophmoric." In Connie's longest extended stay with Luce, we get 2 pages on family life, and 2 pages on equality and 2 pages on reproduction, etc, etc. Luce leading Connie around and politley lecturing to the savage from the past. Piercy does not make her future perfect or her people in it perfect, but still, she is clunky and didactic when having the brave new world explained to the outsider. In other words, too much telling, not enough showing.

My other concern with the novel are the sacrfices she believes are required of both men and women in order to live in a gender neutral utopia. Not too offer to much of a spoiler on this front, let me just say that I am not against reproductive technoligies (check out Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series for a better use of exogenesis), but I feel that we should have the choice to decide whether to give birth ourselves or by artificial means. In Piercy's future world, children are brewed up anonymously in vats and assigned 3 unrelated people (men, women, whatever) to be "co-moms." Thus children are freed from problems that occur between their parents and freed from the, "you look just like my grandfather, etc, etc." I hope instead for a future that will broaden family and choices without such extreme denial of our biology and our sense of our own bodies.

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