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Rating:  - both historical fiction and sci-fi
This novel presents parallel stories of the Golum of Prague and the cyborg of the future, both "men" created to protect the societies in which they were "born." Both evolve beyond "creature" or "robot" to become self-aware and fall in love with a human woman, and thus become so threatening that they are destroyed by the humans they seek to embrace. As a non-Jewish reader, I was inspired to look up the history of the golum in Jewish Kabbalah legends and surprised to find out that there is a statue of the legendary golum in Prague. The story stalls in the middle third as the same-old-love-story unfolds ... tediously. I would have liked more depth and detail on the various societies Piercy hints at in the future, expecially the great masses that survive in apparent anarchy in this post-apocalyptic world. The ending is too pat; why didn't Yod disappear into the Glop? Great concept, though.
Rating:  - Matrix Revisited
This novel is fully science-fiction in genre (for Marge Piercy is not afraid to dabble in whatever style interests her, from historical fiction, to memoir, to sci-fi, to poetry.) And "He, She and It" has many elements found in "The Matrix" (but "He, She and It" came out way before "Matrix) You wonder if the makers of that hit film series owe Ms. Piercy an enormous monetary debt of gratitude.
The story centers around Shira, a bright young woman who makes a bad mistake; she marries the wrong man. Pigeonholed by the large "multi" (corporation) who bid for her services when she graduated, she's living on borrowed time in the safe but stifling domed city built by her multi to house the workers and managers against the perils of the polluted open lands and even more perillous decayed and overpopulated metropolis ("Glop" for short.)
Shira doesn't realize how short her time really is, and how soon she will be moving on, leaving behind her job, and much much, more of value to her. She moves home to one of the free cities on the seashore, deemed unsafe by virtue of severe weather (a gift of global warming.) She moves in with her grandmother and takes a job with Avram, a cybernetics expert. Avram has created a golem, a robot, a protector of the Jewish free city. Shira is hired to teach the robot, and develops a strange relationship with the creature, who, like Frankenstein's monster, is filled with both love and hate. Meanwhile, she must deal with her own past and past loves, and learn why she made bad decisions. Shira threads a path filled with dangers, but comes out stronger and wiser. Not without a high price, however.
Piercy mixes the legend of the Golem from the Ghetto of Prague (a clay creature created by a rabbi to protect the people from a pogrom) and a fast-paced parallel story full of adventure. This story-by-story structure will be familiar to readers of other novels by Piercy such as "Woman on the Edge of Time" where a woman in an insane asylum shifts between her present reality and the future of the year 2037.
This is an extraordinary novel. If you liked "The Matrix" and "The Handmaid's Tale" you will love "He, She and It." I don't think it's quite as good as Piercy's superb "Woman on the Edge of Time" but this is a worthy novel that had me reading it cover to cover without stopping. Highly recommended.
Rating:  - Logically Bad Science Fiction
One of the most astonishing things I found about Marge Piercy was that she had actually written science fiction before this. In all honesty, I would have bet serious money that she had had no contact with science since leaving high school.
At the time of this review, I am a fourth year computer science student at a major university. I have been online for the better part of a decade, and I know how computers and the people who use them work, at least to a whole order of magnitude more than the author.
Now, I will give credit where it�s due. Marge Piercy is a competent writer with good technical skill. Her characters of Shira (heroine, woman trying to find her way in the world), Malkah (mother), and Yod (android who slowly grows to be human over the course of the novel in a very fine transition) are all distinct and well fleshed out.
What aggravated me most is how totally and utterly...blind some of them were! UGG!!! There are several scenes were Shira, who recounts and describes things to the reader, does not see what is so plain and obvious and then reacts with surprise and horror when it finally dawns on her!! For example, she describes her mother to the reader, mentioning her mother�s predilection for remaining unattached and taking various partners to bed. This is a prominent point. Then she describes how �close� her mother seems to the android Yod and vice versa. And then reacts with shock several chapters later when she learns the two of them were sleeping together. I had been thinking �She slept with the android� after reading for aforementioned paragraphs. Really, it�s not Shira�s fault; she inherited it from her mother Malkah. Seriously, how thick do you have to be to react to two (it�s been a little while since I read this, so the number could be off by 2-3) cyber attacks that leave members of your community in a vegetative state, three more that KILL progressively higher ranking people, the LAST one being your own apprentice (!), with the statement �I never saw this coming� when it happens to you? That was the only time in my life I have ever thrown down a book in disgust.
The thing that killed me the most about this book was that the technology in this world was just SO illogical! For starters, Shira states right at the beginning of the book that the city sized dome she lives under (suburbs, mansions, factories, shopping district, office buildings) has no building higher than six stories, but the author gives no reason for this. I�ve come to assume it�s because the DOME is no higher than six stories. We later even see a dome built in the ruins of a contemporary city, complete with intact abandoned skyscrapers, that�s also only six stories high. Considering the angle of arch required for a self supporting dome (no mention of support columns and the like is given) the angle and ceiling height would have to be immense for a dome to cover a whole city! Shira�s home town also sports a dome, but it suffers from numerous seeming contradictions and lack of description. Now a question to all those sci fi movie buffs out there; if you were to build an android who was to protect your town both in cyberspace and reality, and you were designing it from the ground up, would you base your design on Ash/Bishop from the Alien/Aliens movies, or the T-800 from the Terminator movies? Wild guess if Mrs. Piercy agrees.
To top it all off, at the very end, Shira realizes that she cannot rebuild Yod, but for TOTALLY the wrong reasons!! The reason that Yod worked at all, we learn, is that his AI personality was designed to learn and grow like a child. It grew in accordance to what happened around it; in other words, it was subjectively based. Thus, Shira couldn�t recreate him the way he was anyway, as she�d have to duplicate his whole life! It doesn�t matter how cruel it is to bring him back against his wishes (her rationalization), it couldn�t be done anyway! And I�m not even going to go into the whole fact that he was a MACHINE, with a mechanical brain, which could have been BACKED UP(!) rather than let him be destroyed.
A final thing that annoyed me to no end was how computers were used in this world. The user seems to have a godlike ability to create whatever they want, yet these people have zero imagination in creating defences. There were even instances of things that made me say �We can stop attacks like that NOW.� Also see the back up note in the above paragraph. All in all, I got the feeling that these characters really had no clue about how computers work in the real world. Same for societies of computer users. MUCKs and MUDs have been around for 30 years or more now. And given the popularity of games like Everquest and other MMORPGs now, and the fact that people in this universe have known that age and gender can be changed for years, Yod being the first one to discover that any shape can be taken in cyberspace just flies in the face of history.
To end things, I just want to say that while the characters are well thought out, the story flows nicely, there is a great parallel story about a Golem in the 1600s and it adds a few nice twists to sci fi. On the (glaringly) bad side, we have a scientifically illogical world, characters that are dense and blind, some ravening stereotypes for lesser characters, and a complete lack of understanding of the field she bases almost all the action around. If you want a good love story, this passes for it. But if you have any real background in science, stay away and avoid the headaches.
Rating: - He, She and It from a Technological Perspective
"He, She and It" is an intoxicating book about the future. From a technological perspective, the lives portrayed in the ultramodern societies of Tikva and the Y-S Enclave is right on target. How far away are we really from the Earth that Marge Piercy describes? With the impending war with Iraq on our heels, maybe the 2 Week War of 2017 where a terrorist launched a nuclear device that destroyed the world as we know it, is not so futuristic after all.
"He, She and It" is a love story between Shira, a woman of the modern world and Yod, a cyborg. Piercy cleverly parallels the story of Shira and Yod with that of Chava and Joseph. Joseph, the golem of Prague's Jewish ghetto in the 15th century. Although the stories of Yod & Joseph are the heart of Piercy's novel, let me also share with you the technological perspectives.
In "He, She and It", Piercy describes some of the most amazing technological advances. The first and most astonishing of those is Yod, the cyborg. Yod looks just like a human, yet he has the power of a large bomb within him. What is even more surprising about Yod is that he has feelings and the ability to learn from social interactions. In other words, Yod can teach himself from experiencing the environment.
Piercy also mentions many other new technologies that come about after enclaves of monolithic corporations replace governments (is this really so far-fetched?). There is a new field, psychoengineering, an interface between people and large artificial intelligences. Shira is able to tell time simply by thinking that she needed to know what time it was and then reading the internal clock on the corner of her cornea in an eye that has retinal implants, used to correct hereditary myopia! She is also able to project into the worldwide Net (similar to what we know as virtual reality) through a "little silver socket at her temple."
Still, Piercy mentions more. Horsicles (horse robots), moving sidewalks, float cars and zips are the transportation modalities of the future. A main chore of this modern world is to protect their data from information pirates. While people may bodily protect themselves with resin knives with hypercharged particles that are able to cut through a diamond yet not show up on any sensor. The list goes on and on.
In conclusion, "He, She and It" is a wonderfully entertaining book about love, about loss, about the future of our planet. It has the ability to make those in the field of technology stop and take a look at what we are creating versus what we really want to create. Take a read yourself and discovery the vivid imagination of Piercy.
Rating:  - only the ending prevents 5 stars
Marge Piercy doesn't do science fiction often. As with many writers who dip into that genre infrequently, it can be a toss up whether or not the next attempt will be good. "He, She, and It" is good. The main character is Shira and we follow her life for a few months as she fights for her child, herself, her family, and her hometown, and her lover. These "fights" are almost universal, they seem as though they could happen at any time but by placing them into the future, Piercy allows us to question the reasons for these fights at all. Are they "natural" or "social" or a mixture? Frankly I found the idea of corporations controlling most of the world except for agriculture and a few "free towns" difficult to grasp but since this isn't really the point of the story, I'm not docking points stars for that...
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