Product Description

"A triumph of the imagination. Rich, complex, impossible to put down."
Alice Hoffman
In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions--and the ability to kill....
From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62873 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-23
• Released on: 1993-01-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this diverting tale of the 21st century, Piercy explores a world where information has become a commodity more precious than gold.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This is Piercy's first full-fledged foray into science fiction, although Woman on the Edge of Time ( LJ 6/1/76) flirted with the genre. In the 21st century the world has been ravaged by environmental disaster and war, with much of the populace living in corporate domes. Depressed over child custody problems with Josh, her ex-husband, Shira Shipman returns to her childhood home, one of the few free Jewish towns. There she falls in love with Yod, an illegal cyborg created to defend the town against attack. Filled with fantastic technological description, the plot zooms to a page-turning climax. A story of a golem in 17th-century Prague told by Shira's warmhearted grandmother mirrors the action. While not as visionary as Doris Lessing's "Canopus in Argos" novels, this projection of a world with a computer for a soul has the ring of reality. As usual, Piercy's women are strong and sympathetic. With the exception of Yod, her men are either frivolous or cold. Recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/91.
- Harriet Gottfried, NYPL
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Despite a contrived subject--the parallel adjustment problems of a 21st-century cyborg and a 17th-century golem--the latest from Piercy (Summer People, 1989; Gone to Soldiers, 1987) boils down to a gripping love story. Shira is a midlevel artificial-intelligence expert working for Yakamura-Siemens, a corporation-state. When she loses custody of her beloved son, she returns to their birthplace, a little enclave centered around the practice of Judaism, and accepts a job working for Avram, the father of her childhood lover. Avram has created an incredibly sophisticated robot that can pass for human. To counteract the violent tendencies that had marred his previous efforts, Avram enlisted Shira's grandmother Malkah to construct the robot Yod's human personality (i.e., to make ``him'' needy, emphatic, sexual). Intermixed with Shira's narrative are Malkah's messages to Yod, including an overlong didactic bedtime story about the creation of a golem in the Jewish ghetto of Prague--a golem who protected the community against deadly pogroms but who guaranteed his own demise by falling in love with a human woman. Y-S, the nasty conglomerate, wants Yod and tries to use Shira's love for her hostage son to get her to betray her community. But Shira has fallen in love with the robot. As the golem's tale foreshadows, many complications follow. Piercy's scattershot vision of the 21st century underwhelms, and all eyes will glaze over during the Prague interludes. But unlike her past efforts that have substituted overheated plotting for focus and character development, the latest fleshes out its heroine and creates a resonant evocation of love found and lost. An overwrought conceit, then, that has at its core an engaging story. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

he she it review
A good piece of novel dealing with many issues. gender, feminism, bodies...Sci-fi aspect is just a background but it is woven meticilously

A longtime favorite
Ms. Piercy is one of my favorite writers, and this was the first book I read by her. I prefer this and other of her sci-fi writings to her historical fiction and social commentary pieces.

Her continual challenges to gender definitions and boundaries always fascinate. In this story, vanity is a ruling force and helps to enforce the socioeconomic classes that exist in what seems to be a techno-corporate-fiefdom. The naievete and rebelliousness of the characters in Shira's circle are somewhat implausible as far as their innocence in thinking, in line with what one would expect from a heightened consciousness and facilitation through technology. Nevertheless, it prevails as a fun and provocative read.

Spiritual SF
I always enjoy Marge Piercy's books, but I wish she'd write more SF, like this one is. Marge Piercy is at her best when she is unfettered by mere temporal facts.

The cyberpunk world of Marge Piercy's *He, She, and It* future is an environmental wreck where a few domed cities are decent places to live, and the rest of the world is gang-ridden and poisonous. The heroine of this book, Shira, is enmeshed in a bad situation and returns home to a Jewish stronghold domed city. (Although Piercy writes a lot about being Jewish, I really liked that some of the few freehold cities, which are not owned by corporations for their employees, are Jewish. It's like they covered Israel in glass for all posterity.) There, Shira meets Yod, an artificially intelligent robot/cyborg who is, to borrow a phrase, ...fully functional.

Shira lives with her grandmother, whose pithy wisdom becomes angelic at times. One thing that the grandmother said has stayed with me for years and shaped my own spirituality: (paraphrasing), that one cannot pray for things, because that is selfish. One can only pray for understanding. That changed me greatly. Now, when I hear or read that someone is praying "for" something, it sounds to me like a 5-year-old child praying for candy, an utterly selfish and useless prayer.

TK Kenyon
Author of Rabid: A Novel and Callous: A Novel