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He, She and It
In the post-apocalyptic twenty-first century, Shira Shipman, a woman caught in a deadly struggle for information, becomes involved with an illegal cyborg, an involvement that has links to a seventeenth-century Kabbalist who gives life to a golem
446 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
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11214 people want to read
About the author
Marge Piercy
113 books927 followersMarge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
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January 31, 2022
It's the near future and the Earth has been decimated by war and pollution. The world is run by huge corporations (multis) whose chosen employees adhere to rigid, stylized rules for dressing, working, and living.
Most people, however, live in far-reaching, dangerous, poverty-ridden slums called The Glop.
A few towns that are able to create and sell original technology to the multis remain free.
People around the world have access to an extensive computer network into which they can project themselves to obtain information, do research, play games, communicate, and so on. However, users of the network can be cyber-attacked and even killed so defensive computer technology is in high demand.
As the story opens, Shira, an employee of the Yakamura-Stichen (Y-S) corporation has divorced her husband and lost custody of her son, Ari.
Devastated, Shira returns to her original home in Tikva, a free Jewish town. There she lives with her beloved grandmother Malkah - a whiz at designing protective computer technology.....
....and takes a job with Avram - a scientist who has created a humanoid cyborg called Yod, designed to protect the townsfolk from corporate raiders and assassins who want to co-opt its technology.
Shira's childhood boyfriend Gadi, who broke her heart, is also back in town, having been suspended from his job creating stimmies (recreational interactive holograms).
Much of the story revolves around Yod, who develops desires and emotions - essentially becoming more of a person - as he works with Malkah, Shira, and other townspeople. As the story proceeds the Y-S corporation perpetrates various shenanigans in an attempt to get their hands on Yod, going so far as to use Shira's child, Ari, as bait.
Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Malkah relates a story to Yod about a medieval Jewish ghetto in Prague where the rabbi created a Golem (a powerful clay being) to protect the ghetto from raids staged by the surrounding Christian population. Like Yod, the Golem developed the characteristics of a human.
The book examines the question of what it means to be a 'real person' and whether an artificially created being has rights. I thought the various characters in the story were well-written and interesting and I cared about their lives and what happened to them. I also enjoyed the story though I felt it should have ended with more of a bang instead of a fizz.
It's a good book though, and I recommend it, especially to fans of sci-fi cyberpunk literature.
You can follow my reviews at https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot....
November 13, 2013
Published in 1991 (Body of Glass in the USA), He, She and It is a dystopian future in the 22nd century where big, bad global corporations control scarce world resources and remain luxurious, spick and span, while independent free zones remain in squalor but free and dangerous.
The story follows Shira Shipman, working at one such corp called Y-S, recently divorced and forced to give up the custody of her only son, Ari. She returns, dejected, to her hometown Tikva, a Jewish free-zone where she grew up with her grandmother Malkah, a brilliant programmer until she was 17. She meets Yod, an illegal assassin android created by Malkah and her one time lover Avram to protect Tikva, and gradually, despite her reluctance, falls in love with him, while simultaneously trying to get her son back and teaming up with her renegade pirate mother Riva and her gang, Avram, Malkah and Yod, tries to thwart the attack of Y-S on Tikva.
Parallel to the surface story is one of the better-known story of how the Golem Joseph was, in Jewish folklore, created out of clay by Judah and his wife Perl to protect their town from pogroms in 1600s Prague. Allusive to the surface story, it foreshadows somewhat the happenings of the futuristic story, while all the time creating parallels between folklore and science fiction.
Basically, it is cyberpunk, but closer to its derivative, feminist cyberpunk, in several ways. While it employs the technology of cyberpunk, it also throws light on prejudices between men and women, men and machines and women and machines, striving to undo the knots that make cyborgs acceptable, but not androids.
Mostly, I was interested in how I read Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the light of the novel. I was delighted to see several connections, until I read the “Acknowledgements” section after the novel, where Piercy acknowledges having incorporated the essay in her fiction. The incorporation, though it enriches the text greatly in terms of layers, it tries too hard to make those connections.
For instance, Yod, the machine that acquires consciousness and tries gradually to comprehend the complexity of human emotions, says at a point to Malkah,
“You are embedded in history in a sense I cannot be.”,
directly alluding to Haraway when she argues that
“The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
The cyborg was not born of a woman, nor impregnated by a man. It does not understand the bonds of blood, as Yod confesses his inability, when he remarks he does not understand Shira's pining for her son or her complex ambivalence towards her mother Riva whom she hardly knows.
Without a conventional birth, a conventional set of father and mother, and having no initiation in bonds formed through the biological process of birth, the cyborg still needs a community – but not necessarily with others of his kind, but someone he can identify with. The Golem (meaning body without soul) is made of clay, a product of mythology and made allegedly in the 1600s, but he is clearly closer to him in essence than any other machine or robot he is “biologically” closer to in the 22nd century.
The structure of the novel alternates between the third person narrative telling the story of the 22nd century and the first person narrative of Malkah when she “penetrates” the Net/Base to talk to Yod every night, telling him the story of the Golem as well as her own troubles. This has three-fold significance. It creates a backstory as well as a foreshadowing on one level. For Malkah, it is a way of teaching Yod through the story his purpose, it is her lessons, or “moral of the story” insinuated through the tale that will later form the subconscious for Yod. And for Yod, it is a way of feeling he belongs – what Haraway so correctly calls “affiliation”, and not “politics of identity”. Yod does not look for other cyborgs to relate to on the basis of a machine-human composite identity. Rather, he longs for “community” – affiliation, which he finds with the Golem in Malkah’s story, and draws parallels on his own between the 17th century Golem and the 22nd century Android.
In a sense, the novel revolves around two people – Shira and Yod – not solely because they make an unlikely couple charged with socio-political implications, but on their own as individual marginalized identities as well. Shira, because she is a woman. Yod, because he is an android. Both of them uncomfortable, misfits and unnatural, in a “man’s world”. Sub-humans.
While Yod represents a conscious entity where whole sets of male-female behavior simply did not apply, Shira is representative of a class where she found herself trapped in a forcibly feminized identity. While Yod finds in Shira a human who considers him at par with humankind in general, in Yod, Shira finds a male (Yod is made to be a male) who does not expect of her conventional feminine behavior, unlike the other men in her life, since the android is free of culturally imbibed separate gender roles.
This is all the more evident when Shira tells Yod,
"Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure ... Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney .. We can't go unaided into what we haven't yet destroyed of 'nature.' Without a wrap, without sec skins and filters, we'd perish. We're all cyborgs, Yod. You're just a purer form of what we're all tending toward."
This is exactly what Haraway says in her essay - “We’re all cyborgs”.
The explicit feminist concerns too are scattered all over the text, as in the Prague Golem narrative where Chava talks about how she feels free after her husband’s death, although she loved him deeply – after his death, “when the grief subsided a little, I began to remember who I had been, before I had loved, before I was a wife and a mother. My old dreams came back. A man may want to marry you because you’re a brilliant scholar, but what he wants is a wife.”, as well as Shira’s remarks in the latter half of the work.
But this otherwise ideologically brilliant text fails on several counts.
It tries too hard to convince the reader in some places. The text is diffused, spread over instead of being crisp, dense and direct. There are no inconsequential digressions, but the narrative flows too leisurely, spending a disproportionate time on issues that do not need to be elaborated upon – things that should be left for the readers to ponder upon as introspection are explicitly laid out as correct, but unnecessary expositions.
The characters are flat – even the attempts to imbue them with complexity turn too contrived. The dialogues, in most places, are plain pathetic. Too bare, simplistic and childish. Almost 50-70 pages after I’ve already guessed why Y-S wants to attack Tikva (and which is plain to anyone), Yod announces with a flourish that he has found out the motives of Y-S.
Also, it was so focused on feminism, it almost became a misandrist text. It clearly “reeks” of male-blaming implications. The women are all good, productive, sincere and warm. Men are all insincere, sometimes brilliant but always cold. Except for Yod – because he is not male though his body is male.
Worse, of all the cyborgs Avram had manufactured and then destroyed because they were not perfect, the blame lay with Avram, because he only imbued them with manliness, while Malkah, the quintessential modern woman endowed Yod with feminine behavior that made him less destructive, and more humane, and therefore, human.
Here is what Malkah says – “Avram made him male – entirely so. Avram thought that was the ideal: pure reason, pure logic, pure violence. The world has barely survived the males we have running around. I gave him a gentler side, starting with emphasizing his love for knowledge, extending it to emotional and personal knowledge, a need for connection…”
It seems that Piercy was keen on fictionalizing ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ – and she tried so hard to expand fictionally in over 500 pages what Haraway has condensed in nonfiction of 43 pages, that it becomes banal, commonplace when it had the possibility to turn into a powerful work ideologically and in terms of story-telling.
However, I see immense potential in it in terms of reading material for youngsters. While it is too simplistic to us, it may provide youngsters with an alternative take on contemporary gender equations through the figures of a cyborg and an android, apart from human beings in a futuristic setup. While many are understandably addicted to the Delirium series or Infoquake and its sequels, this would be a more realistic approach without a dense text and with much allure of the cyberpunk world.
But for grown-ups, I’d rather go back to dear old Nekropolis by Maureen F. McHugh who tells a similar tale, but much better rendered when she depicts Morocco under fundamentalist Islamic rule equipped with advanced technology, where a technologically enslaved young woman falls for an android (or a harni in their lingo). That is a much better and much shorter novel than this.
Two stars for the ideology. One star for its potential usefulness to youngsters. Nothing more for anything else. It was a huge, huge disappointment. Having heard a lot of lavish praise, I’d approached it with huge expectations, which didn’t measure up. The ideological premise is wonderful, but the execution is way below the mark. At least, not to my taste.
The story follows Shira Shipman, working at one such corp called Y-S, recently divorced and forced to give up the custody of her only son, Ari. She returns, dejected, to her hometown Tikva, a Jewish free-zone where she grew up with her grandmother Malkah, a brilliant programmer until she was 17. She meets Yod, an illegal assassin android created by Malkah and her one time lover Avram to protect Tikva, and gradually, despite her reluctance, falls in love with him, while simultaneously trying to get her son back and teaming up with her renegade pirate mother Riva and her gang, Avram, Malkah and Yod, tries to thwart the attack of Y-S on Tikva.
Parallel to the surface story is one of the better-known story of how the Golem Joseph was, in Jewish folklore, created out of clay by Judah and his wife Perl to protect their town from pogroms in 1600s Prague. Allusive to the surface story, it foreshadows somewhat the happenings of the futuristic story, while all the time creating parallels between folklore and science fiction.
Basically, it is cyberpunk, but closer to its derivative, feminist cyberpunk, in several ways. While it employs the technology of cyberpunk, it also throws light on prejudices between men and women, men and machines and women and machines, striving to undo the knots that make cyborgs acceptable, but not androids.
Mostly, I was interested in how I read Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the light of the novel. I was delighted to see several connections, until I read the “Acknowledgements” section after the novel, where Piercy acknowledges having incorporated the essay in her fiction. The incorporation, though it enriches the text greatly in terms of layers, it tries too hard to make those connections.
For instance, Yod, the machine that acquires consciousness and tries gradually to comprehend the complexity of human emotions, says at a point to Malkah,
“You are embedded in history in a sense I cannot be.”,
directly alluding to Haraway when she argues that
“The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
The cyborg was not born of a woman, nor impregnated by a man. It does not understand the bonds of blood, as Yod confesses his inability, when he remarks he does not understand Shira's pining for her son or her complex ambivalence towards her mother Riva whom she hardly knows.
Without a conventional birth, a conventional set of father and mother, and having no initiation in bonds formed through the biological process of birth, the cyborg still needs a community – but not necessarily with others of his kind, but someone he can identify with. The Golem (meaning body without soul) is made of clay, a product of mythology and made allegedly in the 1600s, but he is clearly closer to him in essence than any other machine or robot he is “biologically” closer to in the 22nd century.
The structure of the novel alternates between the third person narrative telling the story of the 22nd century and the first person narrative of Malkah when she “penetrates” the Net/Base to talk to Yod every night, telling him the story of the Golem as well as her own troubles. This has three-fold significance. It creates a backstory as well as a foreshadowing on one level. For Malkah, it is a way of teaching Yod through the story his purpose, it is her lessons, or “moral of the story” insinuated through the tale that will later form the subconscious for Yod. And for Yod, it is a way of feeling he belongs – what Haraway so correctly calls “affiliation”, and not “politics of identity”. Yod does not look for other cyborgs to relate to on the basis of a machine-human composite identity. Rather, he longs for “community” – affiliation, which he finds with the Golem in Malkah’s story, and draws parallels on his own between the 17th century Golem and the 22nd century Android.
In a sense, the novel revolves around two people – Shira and Yod – not solely because they make an unlikely couple charged with socio-political implications, but on their own as individual marginalized identities as well. Shira, because she is a woman. Yod, because he is an android. Both of them uncomfortable, misfits and unnatural, in a “man’s world”. Sub-humans.
While Yod represents a conscious entity where whole sets of male-female behavior simply did not apply, Shira is representative of a class where she found herself trapped in a forcibly feminized identity. While Yod finds in Shira a human who considers him at par with humankind in general, in Yod, Shira finds a male (Yod is made to be a male) who does not expect of her conventional feminine behavior, unlike the other men in her life, since the android is free of culturally imbibed separate gender roles.
This is all the more evident when Shira tells Yod,
"Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure ... Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney .. We can't go unaided into what we haven't yet destroyed of 'nature.' Without a wrap, without sec skins and filters, we'd perish. We're all cyborgs, Yod. You're just a purer form of what we're all tending toward."
This is exactly what Haraway says in her essay - “We’re all cyborgs”.
The explicit feminist concerns too are scattered all over the text, as in the Prague Golem narrative where Chava talks about how she feels free after her husband’s death, although she loved him deeply – after his death, “when the grief subsided a little, I began to remember who I had been, before I had loved, before I was a wife and a mother. My old dreams came back. A man may want to marry you because you’re a brilliant scholar, but what he wants is a wife.”, as well as Shira’s remarks in the latter half of the work.
But this otherwise ideologically brilliant text fails on several counts.
It tries too hard to convince the reader in some places. The text is diffused, spread over instead of being crisp, dense and direct. There are no inconsequential digressions, but the narrative flows too leisurely, spending a disproportionate time on issues that do not need to be elaborated upon – things that should be left for the readers to ponder upon as introspection are explicitly laid out as correct, but unnecessary expositions.
The characters are flat – even the attempts to imbue them with complexity turn too contrived. The dialogues, in most places, are plain pathetic. Too bare, simplistic and childish. Almost 50-70 pages after I’ve already guessed why Y-S wants to attack Tikva (and which is plain to anyone), Yod announces with a flourish that he has found out the motives of Y-S.
Also, it was so focused on feminism, it almost became a misandrist text. It clearly “reeks” of male-blaming implications. The women are all good, productive, sincere and warm. Men are all insincere, sometimes brilliant but always cold. Except for Yod – because he is not male though his body is male.
Worse, of all the cyborgs Avram had manufactured and then destroyed because they were not perfect, the blame lay with Avram, because he only imbued them with manliness, while Malkah, the quintessential modern woman endowed Yod with feminine behavior that made him less destructive, and more humane, and therefore, human.
Here is what Malkah says – “Avram made him male – entirely so. Avram thought that was the ideal: pure reason, pure logic, pure violence. The world has barely survived the males we have running around. I gave him a gentler side, starting with emphasizing his love for knowledge, extending it to emotional and personal knowledge, a need for connection…”
It seems that Piercy was keen on fictionalizing ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ – and she tried so hard to expand fictionally in over 500 pages what Haraway has condensed in nonfiction of 43 pages, that it becomes banal, commonplace when it had the possibility to turn into a powerful work ideologically and in terms of story-telling.
However, I see immense potential in it in terms of reading material for youngsters. While it is too simplistic to us, it may provide youngsters with an alternative take on contemporary gender equations through the figures of a cyborg and an android, apart from human beings in a futuristic setup. While many are understandably addicted to the Delirium series or Infoquake and its sequels, this would be a more realistic approach without a dense text and with much allure of the cyberpunk world.
But for grown-ups, I’d rather go back to dear old Nekropolis by Maureen F. McHugh who tells a similar tale, but much better rendered when she depicts Morocco under fundamentalist Islamic rule equipped with advanced technology, where a technologically enslaved young woman falls for an android (or a harni in their lingo). That is a much better and much shorter novel than this.
Two stars for the ideology. One star for its potential usefulness to youngsters. Nothing more for anything else. It was a huge, huge disappointment. Having heard a lot of lavish praise, I’d approached it with huge expectations, which didn’t measure up. The ideological premise is wonderful, but the execution is way below the mark. At least, not to my taste.
June 19, 2017
I finished this book very early on a morning when I was planning to work in the yard all day long. As I trimmed trees, weeded, clipped grass, and gave all the plants a nice drink, I thought how lucky I was to be able to spend my time caring for the life around me.
Not like most of the people living in Shira's day. We only gradually learn what a disaster the planet has become by the year 2059, which is a good way to tell this type of story. I don't like having to read two or three chapters explaining how the world got the way it is; I like for the characters themselves to tell me, the way real people would. A memory shared here, a history lesson remembered there.
Climate change, nuclear war, plagues, floods, the total destruction of the Middle East and its oil fields, a few huge corporations running everything, Smart Houses for some, life in a Soylent Green type of megalopolis for the majority. This is Shira's world. It is scary because it is all too possible: sometimes it seems as if we could wake up there tomorrow. Piercy wrote this book in 1991, and I know of many changes since then that have brought us much closer to the type of life that she imagined.
But the book is not just about how people caused the planet to fall apart, it is also about what happens between people themselves after all the chaos. Relationships are explored: mothers and daughters, male and female, ex-lovers and old friends, robots and humans. There are changes in this aspect of life also, but not as many as you might think. After all, some things do remain the same, no matter what, and (perhaps unfortunately) human nature is one of those things. But then you add Yod, a cyborg, a combination of organic and machine. How will his presence affect Shira and her life? Her job when she returns home to Tikva is to socialize Yod, to help him learn about humans. What will Shira learn from him?
Woven through the events that take place in Shira's life is the story of the Golem of Prague, as told by Shira's grandmother Malkah to Yod, piece by piece like a bedtime story spread out over time. At first these chapters confused me because Malkah speaks about her own life and then shifts to telling about the real-life Rabbi Judah Loew and his world; how he decided to create the Golem in order to protect the Jews who lived in the walled ghetto of the city. Of course it is impossible not to see the connecting threads between the two stories, the similarities between the two worlds, the ever unchanging human natures past and present. This side story makes the whole book deeper and richer, even though I am very sure I have missed many layers in this first reading. I do know that the episode when the Golem was brought to life was the most intense, spine-tingling few pages I have read in a very long time.
I have read quite a few of Piercy's books now and she never fails to amaze me. I have started on a memoir she wrote in 2003 called Sleeping with Cats. I fully expect to be as amazed at her own life as I have been with her fiction.
Not like most of the people living in Shira's day. We only gradually learn what a disaster the planet has become by the year 2059, which is a good way to tell this type of story. I don't like having to read two or three chapters explaining how the world got the way it is; I like for the characters themselves to tell me, the way real people would. A memory shared here, a history lesson remembered there.
Climate change, nuclear war, plagues, floods, the total destruction of the Middle East and its oil fields, a few huge corporations running everything, Smart Houses for some, life in a Soylent Green type of megalopolis for the majority. This is Shira's world. It is scary because it is all too possible: sometimes it seems as if we could wake up there tomorrow. Piercy wrote this book in 1991, and I know of many changes since then that have brought us much closer to the type of life that she imagined.
But the book is not just about how people caused the planet to fall apart, it is also about what happens between people themselves after all the chaos. Relationships are explored: mothers and daughters, male and female, ex-lovers and old friends, robots and humans. There are changes in this aspect of life also, but not as many as you might think. After all, some things do remain the same, no matter what, and (perhaps unfortunately) human nature is one of those things. But then you add Yod, a cyborg, a combination of organic and machine. How will his presence affect Shira and her life? Her job when she returns home to Tikva is to socialize Yod, to help him learn about humans. What will Shira learn from him?
Woven through the events that take place in Shira's life is the story of the Golem of Prague, as told by Shira's grandmother Malkah to Yod, piece by piece like a bedtime story spread out over time. At first these chapters confused me because Malkah speaks about her own life and then shifts to telling about the real-life Rabbi Judah Loew and his world; how he decided to create the Golem in order to protect the Jews who lived in the walled ghetto of the city. Of course it is impossible not to see the connecting threads between the two stories, the similarities between the two worlds, the ever unchanging human natures past and present. This side story makes the whole book deeper and richer, even though I am very sure I have missed many layers in this first reading. I do know that the episode when the Golem was brought to life was the most intense, spine-tingling few pages I have read in a very long time.
I have read quite a few of Piercy's books now and she never fails to amaze me. I have started on a memoir she wrote in 2003 called Sleeping with Cats. I fully expect to be as amazed at her own life as I have been with her fiction.
March 6, 2018
Abandoned. I just didn't connect with this at all. Didn't care for the writing or the characters. Largely a matter of personal taste because objectively there's nothing much wrong with either but I can't be bothered to slog through all its futuristic jargon.
December 30, 2007
Jewish girl in dystopian future meets cyborg, and falls in love. Jewish girl in 1600s Prague meets golem, and falls in love.
As much as I enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, when it comes to books involving golems in Prague, this book takes the blue ribbon. Kavalier took me a while to get in to, but He, She and It gripped me from the beginning and I could NOT put it down. He, She and It is many things--Jewish feminist fiction, a robot love story, dystopian science fiction, cyperpunk sci fi, fiction about class, fiction about corporatization, fiction about environmental disaster and fiction about gender and love and storytelling and armed resistance. It's beautifully written with wonderfully complicated and fascinating characters.
The book has two main parallel stories. The first follows Shira, a woman living in a dystopian cyberpunk future controlled by a handful of oppressive corporations. Her mother is a renegade lesbian terrorist (or freedom fighter) and her grandmother is a genetic scientist who lives in a small Jewish village off the grid. When her husband is awarded sole custody of their son in a bitter divorce, Shira goes to live with her grandmother in the Jewish free zone and falls in love with the illegal cyborg created to defend the zone.
The second story, told by the grandmother, follows a the daughter of a rabbi in the Jewish ghetto of 1600s Prague. Fearing for the lives of his community, the rabbi creates a golem to defend the ghetto. His independent and intellectual daughter falls in love with said golem.
But honestly, no review can do this amazing book justice. I plan to read it many, many times.
As much as I enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, when it comes to books involving golems in Prague, this book takes the blue ribbon. Kavalier took me a while to get in to, but He, She and It gripped me from the beginning and I could NOT put it down. He, She and It is many things--Jewish feminist fiction, a robot love story, dystopian science fiction, cyperpunk sci fi, fiction about class, fiction about corporatization, fiction about environmental disaster and fiction about gender and love and storytelling and armed resistance. It's beautifully written with wonderfully complicated and fascinating characters.
The book has two main parallel stories. The first follows Shira, a woman living in a dystopian cyberpunk future controlled by a handful of oppressive corporations. Her mother is a renegade lesbian terrorist (or freedom fighter) and her grandmother is a genetic scientist who lives in a small Jewish village off the grid. When her husband is awarded sole custody of their son in a bitter divorce, Shira goes to live with her grandmother in the Jewish free zone and falls in love with the illegal cyborg created to defend the zone.
The second story, told by the grandmother, follows a the daughter of a rabbi in the Jewish ghetto of 1600s Prague. Fearing for the lives of his community, the rabbi creates a golem to defend the ghetto. His independent and intellectual daughter falls in love with said golem.
But honestly, no review can do this amazing book justice. I plan to read it many, many times.
June 22, 2024
Creation is always perilous, for it gives true life to what has been inchoate and voice to what has been dumb. It makes known what has been unknown, that perhaps we were more comfortable not knowing. The new is necessarily dangerous. You, too, must come to accept that of your nature, Yod, for you are truly new under the sun.
What a fucking trip! This is the kind of book that seems written specifically for me and my specs (hah), it's light on the action (and a bit slow going!), but heavy & rich on characterization and relationship details, exploring themes of autonomy & agency, for women *and* cyborgs/ golems! It made me feel happy with its density of loving details in this world and the connections between the people. And it also made me very happy from a political & emotional standpoint.
I know I've only read two books by her (this and Woman on the Edge of Time), but I am ready to call it: Marge Piercy has become a favorite author for me. Sadly, she doesn't have a lot more speculative novels, but I will be reading her historical fiction/ poetry and everything else, probably.
This book is a sort of near future (2059) retelling of the Golem of Prague story, with a more clear-cut retelling of the golem story within the pages. I loved how the two timelines (past Prague and future Tikva - somewhere near Boston-ish) are in dialogue with each other but they're not a full 1-to-1 mirroring. It is a book deeply and lovingly immersed in Jewish culture that features five amazing women characters. Six if we count the House AI, who is very salty, love her!
Shira, arguably the main character, is the most conventional of them (and that is remarked upon in the book and it's intentional), but ends up being transformed by her relationships with most of the other ones - except Chava, who is part of the Prague timeline). She is the kind of woman defined by her relationships with men, her teen love Gadi (fuck that guy, honestly), her ex-husband Josh, who at the beginning of the novel has just gained custody of their son, Ari, and of course the cyborg Yod (whom I also really loved).
The relationship between Shira and Yod is very interestingly exploring the themes of agency and autonomy - Yod is man-made, which means he is controlled by the patriarchy in similar ways to how women have been controlled during the course of history. He is othered by his creator and the heavily cyberpunky corporation-controlled world, but also he doesn't understand gender roles and steps outside of them quite frequently. Also, the two have sex and it's great! For character development and the themes explored, but also hot!
And then we have Malkah, Shira's grandmother, and Riva and Nili. I don't want to spoil Riva and Nili, but I want to take a moment to simply gush about Malkah. I was chuffed to realize that she is a bisexual Milliennial (born in '87) - no wonder I completely fell for her passion, her spirit, her resilience and sense of humor. Also, her deep empathy and pragmatism. What a freaking character!
As for the political content... This book comments in a very subtle way on the nuclear family, sexual orientation, gender roles, motherhood, labor rights and so on. There is more overt not-so-subtle commentary on relationships between women and men. But it's also not heteronormative at all, this book aims to subvert expectations. There are a thousand little shiny moments that gave me pure jolts of happiness while reading. I don't want to say too much, because I don't want to spoil them, but everything related to Nili is gold!
Just as an example, take this bit about Chava in the Prague ghetto:
She admires women who descend into the necessary factories of the body and the home and make daily life happen. But as a midwife, she has enough of the flesh and the wet red pain of living. She is an excellent midwife. If a mother can be brought through safely, she brings her through. By law, a mother is preferred to an unborn child. No child is deemed fully human till born and until welcomed into the community, named. But if she can save the baby, she saves the baby too.
Just the use of language in framing the body and the home as necessary factories, Piercy calls to attention the notion of reproductive labor - pregnancy, birth, motherhood, taking care of a home and so on is necessary work, and work that has been devalued. Chava does not hate this work, she is a midwife by choice, and she is also a brilliant scholar, and yet her community does not understand why she constantly refuses the proposals of men and why she prefers to stand on her own.
At the same time, Tikva, the small techie town, manages to become such a vivid, lived-in community (pretty anarcho-communist, related to the Mattapoisett of Woman on the Edge of Time), with council meetings and parks and parties and children. Where people snitch on you if you appear to be violating labor rules for your assistant! (I think that these kinds of snitches shouldn't get stitches). Where you are very much encouraged to participate in the governing process. Where people integrate 'The Net' into their spiritual practice, with little rituals before logging on.
The one thing I didn't find fully believable about this is the fact that the characters drink a lot of coffee. Idk, they're very sustainable types and I imagine it's very expensive to buy. But yeah, that's my nitpick.
Since I'm on critiques now, there's also a couple of instances where the word 'autistic' is used very improperly, and also a couple of instances of the R-slur. Ugh, the 90s! Also, Gadi is exiled to Tikva by the multi (entertainment corporation) he works for because of committing statutory rape, and I felt like the narrative let him get away with it (this is not a major spoiler, I thought it was important to mention & criticize, though).
Anyway, I could go on and on, because so many more things I really loved! But a lot of them are spoilery and I don't see the point in just listing them with spoiler tags. I am very happy to have read this and excited to be re-reading 'Woman on the Edge of Time' next month, for the other book club. Also, Marge Piercy has a blog and it's very cute! She is 87 and still writing!
What a fucking trip! This is the kind of book that seems written specifically for me and my specs (hah), it's light on the action (and a bit slow going!), but heavy & rich on characterization and relationship details, exploring themes of autonomy & agency, for women *and* cyborgs/ golems! It made me feel happy with its density of loving details in this world and the connections between the people. And it also made me very happy from a political & emotional standpoint.
I know I've only read two books by her (this and Woman on the Edge of Time), but I am ready to call it: Marge Piercy has become a favorite author for me. Sadly, she doesn't have a lot more speculative novels, but I will be reading her historical fiction/ poetry and everything else, probably.
This book is a sort of near future (2059) retelling of the Golem of Prague story, with a more clear-cut retelling of the golem story within the pages. I loved how the two timelines (past Prague and future Tikva - somewhere near Boston-ish) are in dialogue with each other but they're not a full 1-to-1 mirroring. It is a book deeply and lovingly immersed in Jewish culture that features five amazing women characters. Six if we count the House AI, who is very salty, love her!
Shira, arguably the main character, is the most conventional of them (and that is remarked upon in the book and it's intentional), but ends up being transformed by her relationships with most of the other ones - except Chava, who is part of the Prague timeline). She is the kind of woman defined by her relationships with men, her teen love Gadi (fuck that guy, honestly), her ex-husband Josh, who at the beginning of the novel has just gained custody of their son, Ari, and of course the cyborg Yod (whom I also really loved).
The relationship between Shira and Yod is very interestingly exploring the themes of agency and autonomy - Yod is man-made, which means he is controlled by the patriarchy in similar ways to how women have been controlled during the course of history. He is othered by his creator and the heavily cyberpunky corporation-controlled world, but also he doesn't understand gender roles and steps outside of them quite frequently. Also, the two have sex and it's great! For character development and the themes explored, but also hot!
And then we have Malkah, Shira's grandmother, and Riva and Nili. I don't want to spoil Riva and Nili, but I want to take a moment to simply gush about Malkah. I was chuffed to realize that she is a bisexual Milliennial (born in '87) - no wonder I completely fell for her passion, her spirit, her resilience and sense of humor. Also, her deep empathy and pragmatism. What a freaking character!
As for the political content... This book comments in a very subtle way on the nuclear family, sexual orientation, gender roles, motherhood, labor rights and so on. There is more overt not-so-subtle commentary on relationships between women and men. But it's also not heteronormative at all, this book aims to subvert expectations. There are a thousand little shiny moments that gave me pure jolts of happiness while reading. I don't want to say too much, because I don't want to spoil them, but everything related to Nili is gold!
Just as an example, take this bit about Chava in the Prague ghetto:
She admires women who descend into the necessary factories of the body and the home and make daily life happen. But as a midwife, she has enough of the flesh and the wet red pain of living. She is an excellent midwife. If a mother can be brought through safely, she brings her through. By law, a mother is preferred to an unborn child. No child is deemed fully human till born and until welcomed into the community, named. But if she can save the baby, she saves the baby too.
Just the use of language in framing the body and the home as necessary factories, Piercy calls to attention the notion of reproductive labor - pregnancy, birth, motherhood, taking care of a home and so on is necessary work, and work that has been devalued. Chava does not hate this work, she is a midwife by choice, and she is also a brilliant scholar, and yet her community does not understand why she constantly refuses the proposals of men and why she prefers to stand on her own.
At the same time, Tikva, the small techie town, manages to become such a vivid, lived-in community (pretty anarcho-communist, related to the Mattapoisett of Woman on the Edge of Time), with council meetings and parks and parties and children. Where people snitch on you if you appear to be violating labor rules for your assistant! (I think that these kinds of snitches shouldn't get stitches). Where you are very much encouraged to participate in the governing process. Where people integrate 'The Net' into their spiritual practice, with little rituals before logging on.
The one thing I didn't find fully believable about this is the fact that the characters drink a lot of coffee. Idk, they're very sustainable types and I imagine it's very expensive to buy. But yeah, that's my nitpick.
Since I'm on critiques now, there's also a couple of instances where the word 'autistic' is used very improperly, and also a couple of instances of the R-slur. Ugh, the 90s! Also, Gadi is exiled to Tikva by the multi (entertainment corporation) he works for because of committing statutory rape, and I felt like the narrative let him get away with it (this is not a major spoiler, I thought it was important to mention & criticize, though).
Anyway, I could go on and on, because so many more things I really loved! But a lot of them are spoilery and I don't see the point in just listing them with spoiler tags. I am very happy to have read this and excited to be re-reading 'Woman on the Edge of Time' next month, for the other book club. Also, Marge Piercy has a blog and it's very cute! She is 87 and still writing!
May 22, 2025
Strong women, engaged and accomplished women, women who don't faint or puke while staring down an enhanced security ape. One of the panel discussions at WisCon this year was the difference between a solid female protagonist and a bad ass super hero, and Marge Piercy needs to be on the next panel. Her characters are strong without being perfect. Shira Shipman is the Mother in this book's trinity of graces. Her son has been assigned to her exhusband in a divorce decree and she wants the boy back. Riva, Shira's mother is the Maiden, dedicated to her work, detached from emotional entanglements, not motivated by glory or attention but by the need for community and individual freedom. Malkah is the Crone, working to apply her searing intelligence against the corporate overlords who want power first. The women are equal to the men, with flaws, quirks and weaknesses usually assigned to whatever girl is in a leading role. Chava, Nilhi are as strong as the Glop leader Lazarus. Weaving the story of Joseph - alive in the ghetto of 1600 Prague - into a video to help Yod, alive in 21st century Tikva understand who he is creates a mobius strip of historical context. The reader, on the fast train of a fascinating story can look out the window and wonder what's the difference between a mechanically enhanced human, and a machine that can learn and grow? Excellent storytelling. Piercy's gift is to narrate a great tale, and trust that her audience will exercise their brains examining the story afterward, and share some good conversation about the book with friends.
May 19, 2014
A friend loaned this to me, telling me one of her profs had told her it was cyberpunk, and she hadn't been enthralled with it. I've read at least one other Marge Piercy, and for the most part, enjoyed this one, although there were some issues that I've seen in both books so far that I'll get to in a minute. But first of all, let's address genre. Is this really cyberpunk? I would tend to fall on the side of no, not really, although there are some elements of classic cyberpunk in there. But instead, I would classify as a late entry into that genre of feminist science fiction that flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. In this case, Jewish socialist feminist science fiction. It's an interesting mix.
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
April 21, 2021
I loved Woman on the Edge of Time so had high expectations of 'He, She, and It' (Oxford comma added for my own sake). I did not find it quite as memorably powerful, because Woman on the Edge of Time contrasts contemporary, utopian, and dystopian visions so brilliantly. Nonetheless, 'He, She, and It' is fascinating and thoughtful sci-fi. It is largely set mid-21st century, when megacorporations have taken over and ruined the planet. Wealthier and luckier people live either under protective domes for corporate workers or more precarious wraps sheltering rare independent settlements; most of the population survives in chaotic slums, unpleasantly named the Glop. In a more conventional cyberpunk novel, the plot would be split between corporate domes and the slums. As Piercy is a distinctively thoughtful writer, she centres her story on a small independent Jewish community named Tikva. Shira, the protagonist, loses custody of her son and leaves her corporate job, returning to live with her grandmother in Tikva. There she meets long-lost family, her first love, and a unique cyborg called Yod. The focus of the book is on Shira's relationships, in particular with Yod. Despite the novel's title, though, gender isn't given much consideration.
In parallel to Shira's narrative, her grandmother tells the story of the golem of Prague. Yod is a 21st century golem, built to protect Tikva, a 21st century Jewish ghetto. The independence of the settlement is continually threatened by corporations, who frequently resort to murder for espionage purposes. As this is a cyberpunk-ish world, people can get their brains fried while jacked into the mainframe. But that is incidental to the exploration of personhood, both of Joseph the golem and Yod the cyborg. A complex web of familial, romantic, and community relationships is carefully developed around them both. I particularly appreciated the thoughtful consideration of duty and morality as applied to Joseph and Yod. Both were created to protect a community from deadly violence, with the implicit sanction to use deadly violence themselves. As they learn and develop, golem and cyborg become more inclined to independent thought. They become frustrated by those who treat them purely as tools and drawn to those who treat them as people. Despite the incremental pace, which allows the characters and their relationships to flower, 'He, She, and It' is very neatly structured. The denouement of Yod and Shira's story isn't unexpected, yet has no less impact for that. I found it very involving and enjoyed the absence any clear ethical conclusions. It felt like an ongoing discussion between the interesting cast of characters, as there are never going to be definitive answers to the questions it raises.
In parallel to Shira's narrative, her grandmother tells the story of the golem of Prague. Yod is a 21st century golem, built to protect Tikva, a 21st century Jewish ghetto. The independence of the settlement is continually threatened by corporations, who frequently resort to murder for espionage purposes. As this is a cyberpunk-ish world, people can get their brains fried while jacked into the mainframe. But that is incidental to the exploration of personhood, both of Joseph the golem and Yod the cyborg. A complex web of familial, romantic, and community relationships is carefully developed around them both. I particularly appreciated the thoughtful consideration of duty and morality as applied to Joseph and Yod. Both were created to protect a community from deadly violence, with the implicit sanction to use deadly violence themselves. As they learn and develop, golem and cyborg become more inclined to independent thought. They become frustrated by those who treat them purely as tools and drawn to those who treat them as people. Despite the incremental pace, which allows the characters and their relationships to flower, 'He, She, and It' is very neatly structured. The denouement of Yod and Shira's story isn't unexpected, yet has no less impact for that. I found it very involving and enjoyed the absence any clear ethical conclusions. It felt like an ongoing discussion between the interesting cast of characters, as there are never going to be definitive answers to the questions it raises.
November 6, 2016
2 stars because while the idea isn't bad, I found that it was easy to get myself lost in all the Jewish terms sprouting in the in-between, and I felt lost with lots of the dystopian information which were sort or given randomly at times. Also, the pace was agonizingly slow, IMO.
There is a woman who asks for a divorce and the custody of her child gets given to the father. We get a lot of remmebrances of her past dalliances with a man called Gabi, the father of which offers her a job back at her more matriarchal home. She has to tutor an android in order to make him more human. But they kind of feel in love.
Also, there is the in-between story, something that happened in the past between a woman and a golem, which is a story of sorts that acts like an explanation and a mirror for the actual story going on.
There is a woman who asks for a divorce and the custody of her child gets given to the father. We get a lot of remmebrances of her past dalliances with a man called Gabi, the father of which offers her a job back at her more matriarchal home. She has to tutor an android in order to make him more human. But they kind of feel in love.
Also, there is the in-between story, something that happened in the past between a woman and a golem, which is a story of sorts that acts like an explanation and a mirror for the actual story going on.
March 2, 2010
"You really took revenge on me. You really did."
January 31, 2012
As you can probably surmise from the huge collection of tags I've attached to this book, there is A LOT of stuff going on here!
Even the structure of this book is complex and multifaceted: two stories, told by two narrators, in alternating chapters. The first narrator is Shira Shipman, a young, upper-middle-class Jewish woman who has recently become a wife and mother. Her life is also almost completely controlled by her employer, a huge biotechnology corporation, not only because they have a very strict, conformist corporate culture (there are even rules, unwritten of course, dictating how women of varying degrees of seniority within the company should dress), but also because Shira lives in what is essentially an upscale version of the company town: it's like a sealed-off, climate-controlled suburb/office park where everyone in the middle and upper ranks of salaried workers and management lives and works. Shira's narration, especially in the early chapters, is therefore suffused with nervousness, and a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, since her husband has recently been promoted and their family moved into a bigger, nicer house. Shira is certain there must be a catch, since she knows she's not exactly a team player, and not exactly in her bosses' good graces.
When the other shoe does drop, Shira packs up and leaves, heading to a place that's the polar opposite of the stuffy corporate-controlled environment she's just fled: it's a free Jewish settlement out in the middle of nowhere, unaffiliated with any of the major corporations that dominate this denuded, radiation-spoiled future Earth. Her grandmother (who brought her up) lives there, and she soon learns that her mother, who left her when she was born, is also coming to stay there. She also soon finds that her grandmother and the father of one of her childhood friends are working on something mysterious and fantastical: a robot that looks, talks thinks and feels exactly like a person, but has superhuman physical and mental abilities.
This robot, who is named Yod (a letter in the Hebrew alphabet; Aleph through Tet were his predecessors, all but one scrapped because of horrible, sometimes deadly, flaws), might be the most interesting character in this novel. That's saying a lot, because this novel is stuffed to the gills with interesting characters. Unfortunately, Shira Shipman isn't one of them --- that's the biggest thing that disappointed me about this book, that practically all of the real-time narration is done by the most boring character. (The other narrator, Shira's grandmother Malkah, spends almost all of her chapters telling the story of the seventeenth-century Rabbi Judah Loews --- also called "the Maharal" --- who created the Golem to protect his people, living as they did in the ghetto of Prague, where Christian mobs could attack them at will. This story is also hugely interesting, but because it's all very external to Malkah herself, the reader doesn't spend as much time in her mind as they do in Shira's. And that's a pity, because Malkah's mind seems like a fun place.) Yod owes his moral and emotional complexity entirely to Malkah's programming; her involvement may well have been the thing that saved Yod from the fate of all the failed attempts before him.
(And now, a random note on terminology: Yod is not a cyborg. There are some cyborgs in this book, but Yod is an android. Cyborgs are people who have been technologically augmented; androids are humanlike technological constructs. Carry on, then.)
Chaos ensues once people outside the tight circle of people who've been working on "the project" learn about Yod and his abilities. There's a lot of corporate-espionage type stuff, amped up by both the apparent absence of laws in this future world (assassination raids, abduction and hostage-taking are apparently standard practice), and the immersive nature of the "cyberspace" the denizens of the free settlement must navigate to earn their livelihood, since they specialize in cybersecurity. (Cybersecurity being very important in this world, what with all the aforementioned corporate espionage.)
This conception of cyberspace --- a three-dimensional "space" that you, virtually embodied as an avatar, move around in to talk to other people, download data, build firewalls or "patrol" existing firewalls looking for signs of intrusion --- is pretty much ripped from the pages of William Gibson's novels, as is the anarchic, impoverished megacity in which Everyone Else (i.e., the poor and the non-corporate) lives. "The Glop" (from "megalopolis," which is one of my favorite science-fiction neologisms ever, and one of the minority that seems like real people might use it) looks a lot like a lower-tech version of the Sprawl from Gibson's novels; Marge Piercy even acknowledges this debt in an afterword.
Derivative as all this is, I still found the worldbuilding in this book to be pretty solid. It helps that Piercy spends most of her time developing settings that aren't the Glop or corporate bubbles: her most original, most interesting "world" is the small, tight-knit community of Tikva, which marries freedom and openness with airtight security and a technological specialization that basically buys them their autonomy. (As in, every major corporation wants to buy their firewalls, so they all tolerate the upstart little city-state's existing outside any one of their control). It's a really interesting, well-realized picture of an intentional community, with a sharp focus on day-to-day survival in an uncertain world.
Another juxtaposition this settlement (and the book as a whole) tries to embody is that of future and past. Everyone in Tikva is a practicing Jew, and Jewish religious and cultural identity are just as integral to the place's cohesion and survival as its cutting-edge technology.
But the best thing, in a novel where everything is done amazingly well, has got to be the characters. I did not find Shira very interesting, but almost every other character who was in the book for longer than a scene or two was absolutely fascinating. And even Shira, though boring (to me), was well-developed, believable and even relatable. She evolves over the course of the book, and we see a lot of different aspects of her character: her feelings of confusion and betrayal when she has to confront her mother for the first time, and her slow metamorphosis from a closed-off, emotionally stunted, timid woman to someone bold, spontaneous and loving, which coincides with her finally moving past a schoolgirl crush on another character. And Yod! Yod is an absolutely masterful work of creation; he's not human, exactly, and he's also not male in the way that a man is male (psychologically, that is; physically he's quite male), but he is certainly a person, and despite the title he is not an "it." (His ambiguous status comes up when he wants to participate in some ritual, I forget which, that is restricted to Jewish men. He wants to be considered, not just human, not just a man, but specifically a Jewish man). His emotions were about half familiar to me (as an autistic person, I am well acquainted with the angst of wondering whether one is really human or not) and half alien (he was made for violence, and takes a predatory delight in it that bothers the moral and relational parts of his psyche), and all beautifully described and conveyed through his confused-but-eloquent speech and his halting, work-in-progress manner. He's definitely one of my favorite non-human characters I've ever encountered.
Even the structure of this book is complex and multifaceted: two stories, told by two narrators, in alternating chapters. The first narrator is Shira Shipman, a young, upper-middle-class Jewish woman who has recently become a wife and mother. Her life is also almost completely controlled by her employer, a huge biotechnology corporation, not only because they have a very strict, conformist corporate culture (there are even rules, unwritten of course, dictating how women of varying degrees of seniority within the company should dress), but also because Shira lives in what is essentially an upscale version of the company town: it's like a sealed-off, climate-controlled suburb/office park where everyone in the middle and upper ranks of salaried workers and management lives and works. Shira's narration, especially in the early chapters, is therefore suffused with nervousness, and a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, since her husband has recently been promoted and their family moved into a bigger, nicer house. Shira is certain there must be a catch, since she knows she's not exactly a team player, and not exactly in her bosses' good graces.
When the other shoe does drop, Shira packs up and leaves, heading to a place that's the polar opposite of the stuffy corporate-controlled environment she's just fled: it's a free Jewish settlement out in the middle of nowhere, unaffiliated with any of the major corporations that dominate this denuded, radiation-spoiled future Earth. Her grandmother (who brought her up) lives there, and she soon learns that her mother, who left her when she was born, is also coming to stay there. She also soon finds that her grandmother and the father of one of her childhood friends are working on something mysterious and fantastical: a robot that looks, talks thinks and feels exactly like a person, but has superhuman physical and mental abilities.
This robot, who is named Yod (a letter in the Hebrew alphabet; Aleph through Tet were his predecessors, all but one scrapped because of horrible, sometimes deadly, flaws), might be the most interesting character in this novel. That's saying a lot, because this novel is stuffed to the gills with interesting characters. Unfortunately, Shira Shipman isn't one of them --- that's the biggest thing that disappointed me about this book, that practically all of the real-time narration is done by the most boring character. (The other narrator, Shira's grandmother Malkah, spends almost all of her chapters telling the story of the seventeenth-century Rabbi Judah Loews --- also called "the Maharal" --- who created the Golem to protect his people, living as they did in the ghetto of Prague, where Christian mobs could attack them at will. This story is also hugely interesting, but because it's all very external to Malkah herself, the reader doesn't spend as much time in her mind as they do in Shira's. And that's a pity, because Malkah's mind seems like a fun place.) Yod owes his moral and emotional complexity entirely to Malkah's programming; her involvement may well have been the thing that saved Yod from the fate of all the failed attempts before him.
(And now, a random note on terminology: Yod is not a cyborg. There are some cyborgs in this book, but Yod is an android. Cyborgs are people who have been technologically augmented; androids are humanlike technological constructs. Carry on, then.)
Chaos ensues once people outside the tight circle of people who've been working on "the project" learn about Yod and his abilities. There's a lot of corporate-espionage type stuff, amped up by both the apparent absence of laws in this future world (assassination raids, abduction and hostage-taking are apparently standard practice), and the immersive nature of the "cyberspace" the denizens of the free settlement must navigate to earn their livelihood, since they specialize in cybersecurity. (Cybersecurity being very important in this world, what with all the aforementioned corporate espionage.)
This conception of cyberspace --- a three-dimensional "space" that you, virtually embodied as an avatar, move around in to talk to other people, download data, build firewalls or "patrol" existing firewalls looking for signs of intrusion --- is pretty much ripped from the pages of William Gibson's novels, as is the anarchic, impoverished megacity in which Everyone Else (i.e., the poor and the non-corporate) lives. "The Glop" (from "megalopolis," which is one of my favorite science-fiction neologisms ever, and one of the minority that seems like real people might use it) looks a lot like a lower-tech version of the Sprawl from Gibson's novels; Marge Piercy even acknowledges this debt in an afterword.
Derivative as all this is, I still found the worldbuilding in this book to be pretty solid. It helps that Piercy spends most of her time developing settings that aren't the Glop or corporate bubbles: her most original, most interesting "world" is the small, tight-knit community of Tikva, which marries freedom and openness with airtight security and a technological specialization that basically buys them their autonomy. (As in, every major corporation wants to buy their firewalls, so they all tolerate the upstart little city-state's existing outside any one of their control). It's a really interesting, well-realized picture of an intentional community, with a sharp focus on day-to-day survival in an uncertain world.
Another juxtaposition this settlement (and the book as a whole) tries to embody is that of future and past. Everyone in Tikva is a practicing Jew, and Jewish religious and cultural identity are just as integral to the place's cohesion and survival as its cutting-edge technology.
But the best thing, in a novel where everything is done amazingly well, has got to be the characters. I did not find Shira very interesting, but almost every other character who was in the book for longer than a scene or two was absolutely fascinating. And even Shira, though boring (to me), was well-developed, believable and even relatable. She evolves over the course of the book, and we see a lot of different aspects of her character: her feelings of confusion and betrayal when she has to confront her mother for the first time, and her slow metamorphosis from a closed-off, emotionally stunted, timid woman to someone bold, spontaneous and loving, which coincides with her finally moving past a schoolgirl crush on another character. And Yod! Yod is an absolutely masterful work of creation; he's not human, exactly, and he's also not male in the way that a man is male (psychologically, that is; physically he's quite male), but he is certainly a person, and despite the title he is not an "it." (His ambiguous status comes up when he wants to participate in some ritual, I forget which, that is restricted to Jewish men. He wants to be considered, not just human, not just a man, but specifically a Jewish man). His emotions were about half familiar to me (as an autistic person, I am well acquainted with the angst of wondering whether one is really human or not) and half alien (he was made for violence, and takes a predatory delight in it that bothers the moral and relational parts of his psyche), and all beautifully described and conveyed through his confused-but-eloquent speech and his halting, work-in-progress manner. He's definitely one of my favorite non-human characters I've ever encountered.
July 5, 2009
I don't know where I got this book as sci-fi is not the genre I usually read and with a title of "He, She and It" I didn't expect much of it. I was vastly surprised when I found myself reading about the Maharal of Prague. I was humbled and honored to even gaze at the printed word Maharal. I had heard stories about the Golem but didn't know too much. I was very moved by his story and cried when it came to an end. One of my sons has been to Prague and to the Altneushul. He said there are stories about the attic of the Altneushul but that there is no evidence to back up the stories of the Golem. For some reason it is one of those stories I would prefer to believe. My heart became very attached to the Golem as told over to us by Marge Piercy. Even if the Golem is not a true story I am very honored that one of my sons has stood and prayed in the same synagogue as the Maharal. If we don't have a Golem, we have a continuing faith in our Father in Heaven and a continuity as the Jewish people.
Much of the book is not set in Prague or the past. It is set in the future with a cyborg created to protect the free Jewish town of Tikveh. It is a pretty good futuristic story, projecting into the Net seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do and there were some exciting battles, some decent philosophical discussions. I enjoyed it.
Much of the book is not set in Prague or the past. It is set in the future with a cyborg created to protect the free Jewish town of Tikveh. It is a pretty good futuristic story, projecting into the Net seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do and there were some exciting battles, some decent philosophical discussions. I enjoyed it.
June 20, 2008
I started He, She, and It on spring break and finally finished it today, but I'm glad I could savor this novel over three months because it is fabulous. Marge Piercy writes a cyberpunk novel that doesn't ignore women, religion, ethnicity, community. She's the kind of science fiction writer I love: someone who doesn't care about how people interface with a computer or what technology builds a cyborg, but rather what happens and what folks feel.
I may call He, She, and It cyberpunk, but it's not all dark and techy. The razor-girl character, Nihi, is a queer, community oriented mother revision of the archetype started by Molly from Neuromancer. Much of the novel takes place in Tikva, a Jewish anarcho-feminist libertarian socialist community that lives outside the multinational corporate dominated world oppressing everyone. Woven in the story of Joseph the golem from the early modern Prague ghetto.
I recommend that He, She, and I be recognized as part of the scifi/cyberpunk canon and courselists. Unlike hard scifi authors, we don't need to stretch to find Piercy's lefist politics that don't sacrifice a gender or race analysis in critiquing capitalism.
I may call He, She, and It cyberpunk, but it's not all dark and techy. The razor-girl character, Nihi, is a queer, community oriented mother revision of the archetype started by Molly from Neuromancer. Much of the novel takes place in Tikva, a Jewish anarcho-feminist libertarian socialist community that lives outside the multinational corporate dominated world oppressing everyone. Woven in the story of Joseph the golem from the early modern Prague ghetto.
I recommend that He, She, and I be recognized as part of the scifi/cyberpunk canon and courselists. Unlike hard scifi authors, we don't need to stretch to find Piercy's lefist politics that don't sacrifice a gender or race analysis in critiquing capitalism.
July 25, 2017
I re-read this book after many years, and I had to struggle with myself not to give it five stars. It is perfect for me. Reading science fiction set in a world where Hebrew names, Jewish culture, and Jewish history are basics is exhilarating. Plus I care deeply about the issues of the book: gender, power and its abuse, the meaning of love and loyalty.
It also amazes me how well Piercy could imagine the internet, virtual reality, and ecological devastation, writing more than a quarter-century ago. The book lies on the border between Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson (with a little Isaac Asimov sneaking across the lines).
I agree with the readers who note the slow pace of the middle chapters. That doesn't bother me at all. I would gladly have spent even more time with Malkah, listening to her stories and hoping for her caresses.
The writing itself is not up to Piercy's poetic best. She repeats thoughts too often, and she gives minor characters quirks instead of personalities. Still, if she had written nothing else, this one book would have earned her a place in literature.
It also amazes me how well Piercy could imagine the internet, virtual reality, and ecological devastation, writing more than a quarter-century ago. The book lies on the border between Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson (with a little Isaac Asimov sneaking across the lines).
I agree with the readers who note the slow pace of the middle chapters. That doesn't bother me at all. I would gladly have spent even more time with Malkah, listening to her stories and hoping for her caresses.
The writing itself is not up to Piercy's poetic best. She repeats thoughts too often, and she gives minor characters quirks instead of personalities. Still, if she had written nothing else, this one book would have earned her a place in literature.
March 23, 2012
One of my favourite SF books of all time. Time to re-read. That sexism is alive and well and rife in literary culture is proved by the fact that Body of Glass isn't more famous than anything by William Gibson, for example, though I see it did at least win an Arthur C Clarke award. This is published in the US under the truly dreadful title He, She and It. Also worth checking out Woman on the Edge of Time. Classic 1970s feminist utopia, with, if I remember correctly, a rather good dystopia as well.
July 17, 2018
You know when you have a toffee that starts off hard and impenetrable and slowly it warms up and becomes chewier and chewier and moorish and compelling until you are desperate not to swallow it because then it ends? Anyway yeah, that. When people say fans of Margaret Atwood would enjoy this, what they mean is, Margaret Atwood wishes she wrote this. Stick with it for at least 100 pages, doesn’t disappoint. Feminist dystopian sci fi wowie 😍
January 16, 2024
6th book for 2024.
I read this for a monthly scifi bookclub that meets here in Berlin.
This book is in fact two stories told in parallel that mirror each other. One is the story of the creation of a golem to protect medieval Jewish ghetto in Prague; the second the creation of a cyborg, Jod, to protect a Jewish city-state from attacks in the mid-21st Century, in a world that has suffered severe eco-collapse.
While I found the Prague story fascinating, and well written; the scifi part of the story, set in the 21st Century, felt turgid and extremely slow. I was actually shocked near the end to find out the entire story takes place within a mere three-month time frame. Likewise while the characters in the Prague story seemed rich and interesting; the characters the sci-fi timeline were largely exaggerated and one dimensional. I don't buy that you create a "scifi feminist classic" (it says so on the cover!) by just writing all the men as one-dimensional egotistical monsters and the women as complex genius saint/warriors/mother/hackers—this is written to such an extent that the cyborg can only be brought to life by the genius grandmother hacker adding her feminine touch to the cyborg's otherwise broken masculine mind. The fact that this genius touch seems largely to have been to make the cyborg* want to be the perfect sex partner for her and her grand-daughter is just so deeply problematic [Note: if the sexes were reversed in this book, and a female robotist needed a male programmer's help to finish their cyborg, and their contribution was to compel the female-styled cyborg—which everyone agrees is a person—the perfect willing and always available sex partner for the programmer and his grandson, we wouldn't need 550 pages to find out that this was perhaps problematic]. But what really kills this book for me in the end is that the main protagonist, Shira, is just so annoyingly uninteresting and self-centered. It's just such a slog to listen to her whine for 550 pages about her relationship woes.
*Piercy uses the word "cyborg" wrongly throughout the book. A cyborg is a mechanically enhanced human (i.e., most of the humans in the book). Jod was a biomechanical robot.
2-stars for what was an excellent telling of the golem and the Prague ghetto.
I read this for a monthly scifi bookclub that meets here in Berlin.
This book is in fact two stories told in parallel that mirror each other. One is the story of the creation of a golem to protect medieval Jewish ghetto in Prague; the second the creation of a cyborg, Jod, to protect a Jewish city-state from attacks in the mid-21st Century, in a world that has suffered severe eco-collapse.
While I found the Prague story fascinating, and well written; the scifi part of the story, set in the 21st Century, felt turgid and extremely slow. I was actually shocked near the end to find out the entire story takes place within a mere three-month time frame. Likewise while the characters in the Prague story seemed rich and interesting; the characters the sci-fi timeline were largely exaggerated and one dimensional. I don't buy that you create a "scifi feminist classic" (it says so on the cover!) by just writing all the men as one-dimensional egotistical monsters and the women as complex genius saint/warriors/mother/hackers—this is written to such an extent that the cyborg can only be brought to life by the genius grandmother hacker adding her feminine touch to the cyborg's otherwise broken masculine mind. The fact that this genius touch seems largely to have been to make the cyborg* want to be the perfect sex partner for her and her grand-daughter is just so deeply problematic [Note: if the sexes were reversed in this book, and a female robotist needed a male programmer's help to finish their cyborg, and their contribution was to compel the female-styled cyborg—which everyone agrees is a person—the perfect willing and always available sex partner for the programmer and his grandson, we wouldn't need 550 pages to find out that this was perhaps problematic]. But what really kills this book for me in the end is that the main protagonist, Shira, is just so annoyingly uninteresting and self-centered. It's just such a slog to listen to her whine for 550 pages about her relationship woes.
*Piercy uses the word "cyborg" wrongly throughout the book. A cyborg is a mechanically enhanced human (i.e., most of the humans in the book). Jod was a biomechanical robot.
2-stars for what was an excellent telling of the golem and the Prague ghetto.
February 10, 2013
so i'd say i am about 1/2 way through the novel and have gradually become fully and completely invested in the story. the copy i have from my library looks like it was published in the sixties ... you know ... hardback with the plastic slip cover, poorly executed artwork on the cover that (no offense to the artist) but it looks kind of cheap. so in some ways the novel feels more dated than 1991, but in other ways the author has done an admirable job of predicting the future and the book still feels relevant today. 20+ years can really really date a sci-fi novel.
the author has also introduced a timeless element by interjecting the Prague story line and the creation of the Golem to protect the citizens of the Jewish ghetto. this story line perfectly mirrors the creation of the cyborg. throw in some Frankenstein references and the story opens up to a wider philosophical perspective on a theme that has been around for a long long time and has a well-established place in our story-telling traditions.
i think i would get more meaning from the story if i understood more of the religious rites and traditions of Judaism. i suspect i am missing things but i am too ignorant to even know for sure if that is the case. so i will blithely go on reading and enjoying, He, She and It.
it seemed to take me a long time to get finished this book. i didn't want to give up but i wasn't hugely motivated to give all afternoon over to reading it either. i enjoyed the futuristic segments a lot more than the historic .... i wasn't a fan of the second story line. i get why the author did it and agree it provided a valid parallel perspective but ... meh. in the end He She and It was just okay for me. i might have written a kinder review and given one more star but for the fact i started another sci fi written about the same time. it's called Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and i am sooooo hooked, and can't wait to get back into it.
the author has also introduced a timeless element by interjecting the Prague story line and the creation of the Golem to protect the citizens of the Jewish ghetto. this story line perfectly mirrors the creation of the cyborg. throw in some Frankenstein references and the story opens up to a wider philosophical perspective on a theme that has been around for a long long time and has a well-established place in our story-telling traditions.
i think i would get more meaning from the story if i understood more of the religious rites and traditions of Judaism. i suspect i am missing things but i am too ignorant to even know for sure if that is the case. so i will blithely go on reading and enjoying, He, She and It.
it seemed to take me a long time to get finished this book. i didn't want to give up but i wasn't hugely motivated to give all afternoon over to reading it either. i enjoyed the futuristic segments a lot more than the historic .... i wasn't a fan of the second story line. i get why the author did it and agree it provided a valid parallel perspective but ... meh. in the end He She and It was just okay for me. i might have written a kinder review and given one more star but for the fact i started another sci fi written about the same time. it's called Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and i am sooooo hooked, and can't wait to get back into it.
August 25, 2010
I guess I'm going through a robot loving stage. Shira ends an unhappy marriage but her husband not only gets custody of their son, he's allowed to live off-planet. This is a post-apocalyptic world by the way. When she sees there's nothing for her to do, she quits her corporate job (corporations have all the power now) and goes home to her domed Jewish enclave where she grew up accepting a job from a family friend. Well the job is to acclimate a cyborg named Yod. Her grandmother has inputted feelings and they end up becoming lovers. And then are tragically torn apart. There's a bittersweet ending.
I really enjoyed the book EXCEPT for the grandmother's telling a story about a golem in the 1600s to Yod online. This part was so extremely boring to me that I ended up skipping them completely. I guess they are a morality tale, but I got that through the main story and didn't need it again in the story within the story.
I'm giving this book 3.5 stars but would have given it 4 stars if the author had completely removed the golem story.
I really enjoyed the book EXCEPT for the grandmother's telling a story about a golem in the 1600s to Yod online. This part was so extremely boring to me that I ended up skipping them completely. I guess they are a morality tale, but I got that through the main story and didn't need it again in the story within the story.
I'm giving this book 3.5 stars but would have given it 4 stars if the author had completely removed the golem story.
March 29, 2017
3.5, rounding up.
I just gotta say, as much as I ultimately LOVE Marge Piercy stories (the two and one poem I've read of hers) I always have a hard time getting through them. I have to chalk it up to her writing style. Because I love her stories, her characters, her unique plots and (still) her rare feminist-in-a-non-chalant-way attitude about all the things. She writes feminism as a fact, not as a future goal or a current struggle; and that enables her to explore social and community dynamics in a deeper way.
In this story she merges the religious with the scientific by telling two stories that parallel one another: a story of a golem created by holy rite to patrol and protect the Jewish people during a dangerous and revolutionary shift of thought in Prague, and the story of a robot created by a forward thinking scientific mind in efforts to protect his independant community's base (read physical and digital) from the multicorps that run the show in the future. After enlisted the help of a fierce lady who programs Yod with maybe a bit more... emotional learning capabilities than he intends his robot to have, we end up with a weapon program who begins to feel attachments and desires.
As for the corporations, there's been some sort of disaster - nuclear or environmental I'm not quite sure - and the world is a big, hot mess with corporately controlled bubbles and hubs that protect their workers from the harsh UV rays and no food. Yes, exactly like you would think giant corporations would become once they start hiring assassins and being all blatant with their bribery and vicious corporate schemes in efforts to rule a global economy. Shira worked for one of the bigger ones and now she doesn't. So she heads home to her little independent community to be with her grandma (the lady that programmed the social factors into Yod) and there our story begins.
It took me a longer time to read than a book this size normally would. But again, I loved the story. I had the same trouble with Woman on the Edge of Time, which is one of my favorite books to reflect upon. So don't let me put you off of reading it. By all means, I hope you read it and enjoy reading every moment of it.
I just gotta say, as much as I ultimately LOVE Marge Piercy stories (the two and one poem I've read of hers) I always have a hard time getting through them. I have to chalk it up to her writing style. Because I love her stories, her characters, her unique plots and (still) her rare feminist-in-a-non-chalant-way attitude about all the things. She writes feminism as a fact, not as a future goal or a current struggle; and that enables her to explore social and community dynamics in a deeper way.
In this story she merges the religious with the scientific by telling two stories that parallel one another: a story of a golem created by holy rite to patrol and protect the Jewish people during a dangerous and revolutionary shift of thought in Prague, and the story of a robot created by a forward thinking scientific mind in efforts to protect his independant community's base (read physical and digital) from the multicorps that run the show in the future. After enlisted the help of a fierce lady who programs Yod with maybe a bit more... emotional learning capabilities than he intends his robot to have, we end up with a weapon program who begins to feel attachments and desires.
As for the corporations, there's been some sort of disaster - nuclear or environmental I'm not quite sure - and the world is a big, hot mess with corporately controlled bubbles and hubs that protect their workers from the harsh UV rays and no food. Yes, exactly like you would think giant corporations would become once they start hiring assassins and being all blatant with their bribery and vicious corporate schemes in efforts to rule a global economy. Shira worked for one of the bigger ones and now she doesn't. So she heads home to her little independent community to be with her grandma (the lady that programmed the social factors into Yod) and there our story begins.
It took me a longer time to read than a book this size normally would. But again, I loved the story. I had the same trouble with Woman on the Edge of Time, which is one of my favorite books to reflect upon. So don't let me put you off of reading it. By all means, I hope you read it and enjoy reading every moment of it.
November 17, 2017
This beautiful sci-fi novel is set in the mid-twenty-first century, several decades after a major ecological cataclysm and resulting societal upheaval. The reduced human population can no longer live in the open without protective gear and structures, the majority of food must be derived from algae and grown in vats; but computer technology is very advanced, with AIs, service robots, and sophisticated virtual reality. People live in closed corporate enclaves, the sprawling and chaotic urban Glop, or in a few free towns. It's a world that is part cyberpunk, part post-apocalypse, but with a little more organic warmth to be found.
It is in this world that Piercy sets a re-telling of the golem story, alongside a very detailed and elegant rendition of the original tale.
The main character, Shira, has just lost her son in a custody settlement manipulated by her corporate employers. She returns to her grandmother Malkah's house in Tikva, the free town in which she grew up, where she begins working with the town robotics expert and inventor on the training and development of Yod, a highly advanced cyborg he built to protect Tikva from physical and computer-based attack. As Shira's relationship with Yod grows and blossoms, her former employers target Tikva in order to get their hands on the new technology, and the town also makes some alliances with newly emerging communities in the Glop and elsewhere. Piercy thus creates a fascinating and complex story that operates on both an intimate scale and in a wider scope. Interspersed with the main story is Piercy's version of the original golem story, as told to Yod by Malkah, who made major contributions to his programming. This interpolation is nearly seamless and, despite having many parallels with the main narrative, never feels like a repetition or contrived device.
He, She and It is a very moving book, with wonderful characters and a vivid setting. It touches on interesting questions of personhood, control, freedom, development, growth, and the bonds between parents and children, and between lovers.
It is in this world that Piercy sets a re-telling of the golem story, alongside a very detailed and elegant rendition of the original tale.
The main character, Shira, has just lost her son in a custody settlement manipulated by her corporate employers. She returns to her grandmother Malkah's house in Tikva, the free town in which she grew up, where she begins working with the town robotics expert and inventor on the training and development of Yod, a highly advanced cyborg he built to protect Tikva from physical and computer-based attack. As Shira's relationship with Yod grows and blossoms, her former employers target Tikva in order to get their hands on the new technology, and the town also makes some alliances with newly emerging communities in the Glop and elsewhere. Piercy thus creates a fascinating and complex story that operates on both an intimate scale and in a wider scope. Interspersed with the main story is Piercy's version of the original golem story, as told to Yod by Malkah, who made major contributions to his programming. This interpolation is nearly seamless and, despite having many parallels with the main narrative, never feels like a repetition or contrived device.
He, She and It is a very moving book, with wonderful characters and a vivid setting. It touches on interesting questions of personhood, control, freedom, development, growth, and the bonds between parents and children, and between lovers.
June 13, 2015
A long book that started off slow, but got better and better right up until the end. The human creator of this golem/cyborg put it through iterations until the result became increasingly humanlike. In that, the premise of the 2015 film Ex Machina resembles this book, which predated the film by two-and-a-half decades. The robot has opinions, makes conversations, and has sex (as a male).
This book also foretold the rise of the Internet. It has people living in what we might call today "smart houses" where there is an Internet of things and you can issue commands to that air and small robots will adjust your surroundings or retrieve information, and as a result, you are under surveillance all the time. Then again, Orwell got this, too, even earlier.
But more so than it predicts "the future," it looks at the potential opportunities, pitfalls, and philosophical problems in relationships between humans and robots.
This book also foretold the rise of the Internet. It has people living in what we might call today "smart houses" where there is an Internet of things and you can issue commands to that air and small robots will adjust your surroundings or retrieve information, and as a result, you are under surveillance all the time. Then again, Orwell got this, too, even earlier.
But more so than it predicts "the future," it looks at the potential opportunities, pitfalls, and philosophical problems in relationships between humans and robots.
“How do you feel when you see such a mechanism? Do you feel a sense of kinship?” She must be losing her mind, asking a machine how it felt.
Yod rose to rejoin her. When it was not in its security mode, it moved with surprising grace. “Do you feel a sense of kinship when you eat telapia?”
“Why should I?”
“You’re as closely related biologically to that fish as I am as a mechanism to that cleaning robot. Perhaps you’re closer.”
(New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991. p. 88.)
April 19, 2021
Our rabbi read a Marge Piercy poem at Passover this year, and we liked it so well we printed it out to read at our own seder next year. I wasn't sure who Piercy was, so I looked her up and couldn't believe I had never heard of her before. She is an 85-year-old feminist left-wing Jewish activist, poet, and writer of historical fiction, who also wrote cyberpunk novels contemporaneously with William Gibson! Obviously, it was high time for me to become acquainted with this author. That was a lot of throat clearing, now my book review - I liked it! This science fiction novel, published in 1991, is basically a retelling of the Jewish legend of the Golem of Prague, but set near Boston in 2060. Piercy posits a post-famine world run by the 23 huge corporations, and the Jews in the free town of Tikva build a cyborg to protect them. The book takes a while to get going, marred by some pretty clunky exposition, but once it does it's very compelling, dealing with artificial intelligence, personhood, gender politics, and intense mother-daughter relationships. I liked that most of the main characters are observant Jews - it made me realize how rarely they (we) appear in science fiction. Really glad I discovered this author.
January 31, 2009
This was a brilliantly written and brilliantly conceived book - I am a fan of Marge Piercy's poetry, but not as big a fan of her novels - never was able to get into her most famous novel Woman on the Edge of Time. This book, however, captured my imagination and emotions. It was given to me to read by a graduate school friend of mine, and I found myself drawn into the story immediately. I love the complex layers of themes that Piercy gives readers here. At the heart of this novel, for me, is the concept of grappling with what exactly makes us human. It is a marvelously thought-provoking book in the tradition of Mary Shelley's Frankensteing, with an even more futuristic speculative viewpoint. This is a story that I hope to teach, along with Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, in my next Literature by Women course. Fascinating concepts to explore.
December 11, 2020
Le daría diez estrellas si hubiera la opción. Distopia, romance, cyborgs, dilemas éticos, judeidad... sin duda voy a leer más de la autora. Me alegra haber descubierto este libro por azar mientras investigaba sobre golems.
April 15, 2024
An excellent example of the Cyberpunk sub genre. A story about a Jewish woman and a cyborg as they fall in love and tackle the subsequent philosophical conundrums. The characters are well written and the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic world guarantee a story to keep you hooked.
November 1, 2014
Absolutely fantastic book. Deep and layered and fascinating cyberpunk/morality/romance. Hard to describe but worth the read, a classic for sure!
February 25, 2020
In the beginning I was interested in this book, but I got impatient and decided to move on.
So, this book is almost 30 years old! And yet it paints a picture of a future I could believe, and it chilled me. It's a bit like Handmaid's Tale in that way. The world is divided between megacorporations who bid for workers who then live within their compounds and go by their rules. Each corp has its own culture. It also has day workers who come in from the Glop (the megalopolises that surround corporate compounds). Corporate workers are relatively well-off and protected, day workers have access to some corporate privileges but must also live in the Glop, and the many people who do not have jobs or access live in the Glop in criminality and hopelessness. There are also a few independent cities that fight for their independent existence, usually by using their specialized developing technologies as leverage.
Shira, our main character, comes from an independent city but has been living in a corporate dome. However, after she divorces her husband and he takes their son with him to live in an orbital platform, Shira returns to her old home.
I hadn't realized before starting this book just what a prominent theme that Judaism, its traditions and its culture would play. You're probably aware that there's an android in this book, but there's also a very long story thread about a golem (an artificial construct shaped like a person for a purpose by a kabbalist) set in the past just before one of the pograms in Poland. The implications of creating a sentient being and what the purpose of that being should be are examined here. The past story combined with the future dystopia make an interesting contrast.
However, there's also a lot that feels dated. Specifically, male-female relations. Have you read any of those books (mostly written in the 70's) about women who suddenly discover their sexuality and realize that they've been going about it all wrong in the past? Maybe depending on men who weren't as concerned about their pleasure or who were emotionally immature? Well, if you have, you'll recognize a lot of what happens with Shira and Yod. Shira herself wasn't that interesting to me- she didn't understand a lot of what was going on around her and I found her naivete annoying. I ended up getting bored and not finishing the book, but maybe at another time I'd have been more into it.
So, this book is almost 30 years old! And yet it paints a picture of a future I could believe, and it chilled me. It's a bit like Handmaid's Tale in that way. The world is divided between megacorporations who bid for workers who then live within their compounds and go by their rules. Each corp has its own culture. It also has day workers who come in from the Glop (the megalopolises that surround corporate compounds). Corporate workers are relatively well-off and protected, day workers have access to some corporate privileges but must also live in the Glop, and the many people who do not have jobs or access live in the Glop in criminality and hopelessness. There are also a few independent cities that fight for their independent existence, usually by using their specialized developing technologies as leverage.
Shira, our main character, comes from an independent city but has been living in a corporate dome. However, after she divorces her husband and he takes their son with him to live in an orbital platform, Shira returns to her old home.
I hadn't realized before starting this book just what a prominent theme that Judaism, its traditions and its culture would play. You're probably aware that there's an android in this book, but there's also a very long story thread about a golem (an artificial construct shaped like a person for a purpose by a kabbalist) set in the past just before one of the pograms in Poland. The implications of creating a sentient being and what the purpose of that being should be are examined here. The past story combined with the future dystopia make an interesting contrast.
However, there's also a lot that feels dated. Specifically, male-female relations. Have you read any of those books (mostly written in the 70's) about women who suddenly discover their sexuality and realize that they've been going about it all wrong in the past? Maybe depending on men who weren't as concerned about their pleasure or who were emotionally immature? Well, if you have, you'll recognize a lot of what happens with Shira and Yod. Shira herself wasn't that interesting to me- she didn't understand a lot of what was going on around her and I found her naivete annoying. I ended up getting bored and not finishing the book, but maybe at another time I'd have been more into it.
April 11, 2021
1991 erschien dieser Blick Marge Piercys auf die Zukunft aus einer jüdisch-feministischen Perspektive. Spannend, wie sich Zukunft und Feminismus inzwischen verändert haben - oder eben nicht. Am Antisemitismus hat sich leider gar nichts geändert, im Gegenteil.
Die beschriebene Zukunft ist eine Variante des damals üblichen Cyberpunks, wobei Piercy weniger Technikwelten durchdekliniert als William Gibson, dafür aber die Gefühlswelten der Charaktere ernst nimmt. Die Klimakatastrophe hat voll zugeschlagen – es soll also niemand behaupten, das wäre damals noch nicht absehbar gewesen. Der Cyberspace wird bereits durch „das Netz“ ergänzt, ein weltweites öffentliches Kommunikationsmedium, das eine Art Internet plus Virtualität darstellt.
Verschiedene Formen selbstbestimmten weiblichen Lebens bilden den sozialen Kontext: Da gibt es Shiras Großmutter, die eine führende Rolle in der demokratischen Stadt Tikva einnimmt. Statt auf die große Liebe hat sie zeitlebens auf wechselnde Liebhaber gesetzt. Dann Shiras Mutter, die alles dem Kampf für die gerechte Sache unterordnet, selbst den Kontakt zu ihrer Tochter. Und schließlich die reine Frauengesellschaft im ehemaligen Israel, die vom Rest der Welt isoliert lebt. Vermutlich macht gerade diese Vielfalt die Stärke der Vision aus. Dadurch lautet die Botschaft nicht: „Selbstbestimmte Frauen leben so und so“, sondern: „Selbstbestimmte Frauen entscheiden selbst, wie sie leben wollen, und das führt zu ganz unterschlichen Lebenswegen.“
Die Protagonistin Shira selbst ist hingegen von zerbrechlicher Natur. Im Grunde ist sie zu Beginn bereits zerbrochen, im Laufe der Erzählung heilt sie langsam wieder. (Nicht umsonst erschien das Buch auch mal unter dem Titel „Body of Glass“.) Zentral für Shiras Heilung ist das Wachsen ihrer Beziehung zu Yod, dem Cyborg. Genauer: dem Maschinenmenschen mit männlichem Körper und einer Programmierung und Erziehung durch Shiras lebenslustige Großmutter.
Bei Yod stellen sich keine Gender-Fragen, darum geht es dem Buch auch überhaupt nicht. Yod ist schlicht eine Art idealer Mann: viel stärker als Bio-Männer und dadurch ein großartiger Beschützer, gleichzeitig zärtlich und frei von Aggression beim Sex sowie verlässlich, treu und das alles auch einer alten Frau gegenüber genauso wie einer jungen. Während die heutige „Me too“-Kampagne darauf abzielt, fremdbestimmte Sexualität abzuschaffen, geht es im Roman umgekehrt darum, selbstbestimmte weibliche Sexualität aufzubauen. Shira findet mit Yod körperlich zu sich selbst und heilt in der Folge auch seelisch. Eine positive Botschaft. Kritische Botschaften finden sich hingegen kaum. So wird der Sex der männlichen Hauptfigur mit einer 15-Jährigen nur am Rande kurz hinterfragt. Mit der Aussage des Mannes, dass die Initiative vom Mädchen ausging, hakt Shira das Thema ab.
Die jüdische Perspektive gefiel mir sehr gut, schon weil sie in der SF so selten ist. Piercy ist pessimistisch, was Antisemitismus betrifft. (Leider muss man wohl sagen: Realistisch.) Aber man kann die freie jüdische Stadt Tikva und die Frauen-Kultur im früheren Israel auch als Formen jüdischer Emanzipation jenseits der Katastrophe lesen.
Bei Androiden wird ja gern eine Parallele zu Frankenstein gezogen. Marge Piercy erinnert daran, dass es in der jüdischen Kultur eine weitere, viel passendere Geschichte gibt: die vom Golem. Kaum zu glauben, dass der Golem nicht viel häufiger auftaucht im Zusammenhang mit künstlichen Menschen. Hier bekommt er einen eigenständigen Handlungsstrang, der im Wechsel mit der Zukunfts-Ebene erzählt wird.
Ich kann dem Buch viel abgewinnen in Bezug auf die genannten Themen. Darüber hinaus leider nicht. Der lange Roman zieht sich, ohne dass wirklich Spannung aufkommt. Ich hatte auf ein großes Finale gehofft, wurde aber enttäuscht. Das Ende fand ich schwach und unbefriedigend. Stilistisch hätte ich mir öfter gewünscht, die Autorin hätte sich für eine einzige Metapher entschieden, statt dieselbe Aussage in mehreren Darstellungsformen hintereinander zu präsentieren. Die Golem-Erzählung rutscht immer mal wieder in schwülstigen Fantasy-Stil ab. Da steigen dann auch schon mal „Nebelschwaden aus der silbrigen Schwärze des Flusses auf“. Kleine Logikfehler tun ein Übriges. (Z.B.: Wenn man sich im Netz abgesichert treffen kann, warum fand nicht bereits das erste Treffen im Netz statt?) In Summe: Man braucht Durchhaltevermögen, das letztlich nicht belohnt wird. Daher die 2-Sterne-Wertung.
Die beschriebene Zukunft ist eine Variante des damals üblichen Cyberpunks, wobei Piercy weniger Technikwelten durchdekliniert als William Gibson, dafür aber die Gefühlswelten der Charaktere ernst nimmt. Die Klimakatastrophe hat voll zugeschlagen – es soll also niemand behaupten, das wäre damals noch nicht absehbar gewesen. Der Cyberspace wird bereits durch „das Netz“ ergänzt, ein weltweites öffentliches Kommunikationsmedium, das eine Art Internet plus Virtualität darstellt.
Verschiedene Formen selbstbestimmten weiblichen Lebens bilden den sozialen Kontext: Da gibt es Shiras Großmutter, die eine führende Rolle in der demokratischen Stadt Tikva einnimmt. Statt auf die große Liebe hat sie zeitlebens auf wechselnde Liebhaber gesetzt. Dann Shiras Mutter, die alles dem Kampf für die gerechte Sache unterordnet, selbst den Kontakt zu ihrer Tochter. Und schließlich die reine Frauengesellschaft im ehemaligen Israel, die vom Rest der Welt isoliert lebt. Vermutlich macht gerade diese Vielfalt die Stärke der Vision aus. Dadurch lautet die Botschaft nicht: „Selbstbestimmte Frauen leben so und so“, sondern: „Selbstbestimmte Frauen entscheiden selbst, wie sie leben wollen, und das führt zu ganz unterschlichen Lebenswegen.“
Die Protagonistin Shira selbst ist hingegen von zerbrechlicher Natur. Im Grunde ist sie zu Beginn bereits zerbrochen, im Laufe der Erzählung heilt sie langsam wieder. (Nicht umsonst erschien das Buch auch mal unter dem Titel „Body of Glass“.) Zentral für Shiras Heilung ist das Wachsen ihrer Beziehung zu Yod, dem Cyborg. Genauer: dem Maschinenmenschen mit männlichem Körper und einer Programmierung und Erziehung durch Shiras lebenslustige Großmutter.
Bei Yod stellen sich keine Gender-Fragen, darum geht es dem Buch auch überhaupt nicht. Yod ist schlicht eine Art idealer Mann: viel stärker als Bio-Männer und dadurch ein großartiger Beschützer, gleichzeitig zärtlich und frei von Aggression beim Sex sowie verlässlich, treu und das alles auch einer alten Frau gegenüber genauso wie einer jungen. Während die heutige „Me too“-Kampagne darauf abzielt, fremdbestimmte Sexualität abzuschaffen, geht es im Roman umgekehrt darum, selbstbestimmte weibliche Sexualität aufzubauen. Shira findet mit Yod körperlich zu sich selbst und heilt in der Folge auch seelisch. Eine positive Botschaft. Kritische Botschaften finden sich hingegen kaum. So wird der Sex der männlichen Hauptfigur mit einer 15-Jährigen nur am Rande kurz hinterfragt. Mit der Aussage des Mannes, dass die Initiative vom Mädchen ausging, hakt Shira das Thema ab.
Die jüdische Perspektive gefiel mir sehr gut, schon weil sie in der SF so selten ist. Piercy ist pessimistisch, was Antisemitismus betrifft. (Leider muss man wohl sagen: Realistisch.) Aber man kann die freie jüdische Stadt Tikva und die Frauen-Kultur im früheren Israel auch als Formen jüdischer Emanzipation jenseits der Katastrophe lesen.
Bei Androiden wird ja gern eine Parallele zu Frankenstein gezogen. Marge Piercy erinnert daran, dass es in der jüdischen Kultur eine weitere, viel passendere Geschichte gibt: die vom Golem. Kaum zu glauben, dass der Golem nicht viel häufiger auftaucht im Zusammenhang mit künstlichen Menschen. Hier bekommt er einen eigenständigen Handlungsstrang, der im Wechsel mit der Zukunfts-Ebene erzählt wird.
Ich kann dem Buch viel abgewinnen in Bezug auf die genannten Themen. Darüber hinaus leider nicht. Der lange Roman zieht sich, ohne dass wirklich Spannung aufkommt. Ich hatte auf ein großes Finale gehofft, wurde aber enttäuscht. Das Ende fand ich schwach und unbefriedigend. Stilistisch hätte ich mir öfter gewünscht, die Autorin hätte sich für eine einzige Metapher entschieden, statt dieselbe Aussage in mehreren Darstellungsformen hintereinander zu präsentieren. Die Golem-Erzählung rutscht immer mal wieder in schwülstigen Fantasy-Stil ab. Da steigen dann auch schon mal „Nebelschwaden aus der silbrigen Schwärze des Flusses auf“. Kleine Logikfehler tun ein Übriges. (Z.B.: Wenn man sich im Netz abgesichert treffen kann, warum fand nicht bereits das erste Treffen im Netz statt?) In Summe: Man braucht Durchhaltevermögen, das letztlich nicht belohnt wird. Daher die 2-Sterne-Wertung.
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