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: #28399 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

Features

• ISBN13: 9780449220603
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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

Shall we create life to serve ourselves?-a woman's debate
I read Chapter 3 and was hooked("Malkah Tells Yod a Bedtime Story" - pure poetry)! I felt right at home. Rarely have I read a science fiction novel which explores inner life so well. Nor one which so successfully analyzes its moral issues from the intelligent woman's point of view. One is reminded of Golda Meir, holding informal cabinet meetings in her kitchen while making chicken soup. The book examines the high-tech net as a tool for a simple low-tech ethnic collective which can exist on its own apart from impersonal futurist worlds nearby seeking to invade. The characters debate the destiny of their advanced, powerful protective robot. One of the robot's creators is a (high-tech) grandmother who tells the robot the Yiddish fable of a Golem who was created to protect the Jews of Prague from pogroms in 1600. We keep returning to the fable - it creates just the intuitive symbolism we need to explore the novel's ethical concepts without losing track of the action. The book unfolds as a mystery, a love story, a question - I found myself reading to answer the unexplained, enjoying the beautifully crafted journey, and staying up all night to do so.

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.

highly recommended
Had this book not been a gift, I would never have thought to pick it up. Science fiction, Jewish mysticism; these are not subjects which immediately draw most people in. I'm eternally grateful I did give this book a chance, however, for it is definately one of the best books I have ever read. Weaving together two parallel stories, (the legend of a "Golem" created to protect the Jews in Prague's Jewish Ghetto in the 1600s, and the contemporary story of the cyborg Yod), Piercy has created a view of the future a la Margaret Atwood. Yet Piercy's view of the future, while almost as threatening as Atwood's in The Handmaid's Tale, contains the ever present spectre of redemption. While the characters in He, She, and It may live in a forebidding time when corporations rule the world, they maintain a level of autonomy over their own lives, and the knowledge and power to someday create a world more suited to freedom than that in which they currently reside. Piercy's book is fascinating on a number of levels. It is simultaneously the story of a mother's love for her child and the lengths she will go to when that relationship is threatened, a strong community and the familial, religious, and communal ties that bind a group of people together, a cautionary tale of corporate domination, a fascinating hypothesis of both the possibilities and dangers of modern technology, and above all, a romance. The elements of Jewish history and mysticism add to the excitement and passion of the book, enabling the parallel Piercy draws between the past and the future to flow naturally, and add to rather than detract from the book's clarity. Nor are the characters sacrificed for a well-developed plot. Piercy spends just as much time creating the characters who enable her story as she does on the story itself. I would recommend this book to a wide audience. It is as enjoyable as any beach read, but without sacrificing readability, will leave the reader with a lot to think about. You will have no trouble understanding the book after one read, but it is the kind of book you can read many times and learn something new each time.