ABSTRACT
Marge Piercy joins Kim Stanley Robinson and anticipates Octavia Butler in her critical dystopian negation of the social realities of the 1980s and early 1990s, but in doing so she supersedes Robinson's focus on a structure of feeling and Butler's alternative cultural formation. Like Butler's, Piercy's dystopian elsewhere opens on a hegemonic corporate order wherein twenty-three megafirms compete with one another for profits and power in a world that is ecologically devastated. Unlike Butler with her socioreligious movement and Robinson with his rebellious individuals, Piercy crucially locates the leading edge of the anti-corporate opposition directly within the contradictory nature of the capitalist machinery of this future society. Piercy's concern for oppositional possibilities has been a strong emphasis throughout her work. Like Robinson and Butler, Piercy offers her readers a critical dystopian elsewhere that charts new political directions, but in her imaginative space those directions are more confrontational and successful than many people would dare to dream or hope for.
