Customer Reviews

He, She And It

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

This is #1 on my all-time SF list--a stunning, beautifully written book with new ideas and insights on every page. Piercy examines in minute detail the question of what a "perfect" artificial man might really be like, working mostly from the viewpoint of his lover (an expert in artificial intelligence who has worked for one of the multinational corporations that dominate future Earth). A deeply thoughtful book with excellent characterization and an all-too-believable, if somewhat depressing, picture of future society. While I am primarily an SF fan, I was so impressed with this that I have delved into a number of Piercy's other books, many of which are not SF. "Gone for Soldiers" is also highly satisfying and readable (and of course, her other SF novel, "Woman on the Edge of Time"). It's wonderful--especially for someone like me who has followed SF since the 1950s--to have a writer of Piercy's talent using SF as a medium.

I originally read this book as a required college text in modern literature. I've since lost the book but plan on buying a replacement copy.

I've read all 14 of the previous reviews and I have to agree with them all. Yes, feminism and an arguement against corporate - political states and male - dominated societies are present in this book. True as well that there are unfavorable stereotypes in the novel. The novel still has great merit.

At its best, "He, She and It" is a thought provoking parable about the consequences of the paths we may find ourselves on. At its worst, it's a new addition to the cyberpunk genre which is far better than anything Gibson has produced to date. Whether you agree with the views expressed in the novel or not (I personally don't), the story is still an entertaining and well-written diversion.

Marge Piercey's He, She, and It is a slightly different twist on the usual futuristic narrative of corporate control and artificial intelligence. Piercey takes readers on an emotionally and intellectually challenging visit to the near future, where humanity, sexuality, gender, family, community, and spirituality all have different meanings than they do today. The novel questions the definition of these concepts, both in the fictional world, and in contemporary society.

The book allows Shira Shipman, the main character, as she moves from the corporate enclave where she works and lives, to the Jewish settlement where she was raised by her grandmother. Central to the development of the story is Shira's interactions with Yod, a "cyborg" (really an android) built to protect the Jewish settlement from coprporate attackers.

When the novel opens, we learn that Shira's marriage is falling apart, and that her life in the corporate enclave is less than satisfying. She loses her son in divorce proceedings, and when her gradmother asks Shira to return to Tikva, the settlement where she was raised, and to accept a job working for a family friend, Shira agrees.

Shira's new job is to train Yod, the cyborg built to protect the settlement. Yod is the tenth creation of Avram, a Tikva resident who works with artificial intelligence defense systems. Unlike his nine predecessors, Yod is almost flawless: he is practically indistinguishable from a human, except for his behavior. Shira is to teach Yod how to be human, so that he can blend in with the population of Tikva. This is crucial, because in the twenty-first century world of Piercey's novel, a creature like Yod is illegal. Artificially intelligent machines cannot resemble humans.

When Shira first begins to work with Yod, she thinks of "it" as a very complex machine, but no more. As the two work together, however, Shira comes to see Yod as something closer to human: he learns, feels, and thinks much like she and the other Tikva residents. Shira and Yod eventually become involved in a romantic relationship, and, after a mission to recover Shira's child, Yod becomes a "father."

Running parallel to the main plot is the story of Jacob As the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth, rabbi Judah Loew created a golem from clay in order to protect the residents of the Jewish ghetto from the Christian inhabitants of Prague. Shira's grandmother, who programmed Yod, leaves portions of Jacob's story in the settlement's communication network. Slowly, Yod learns the story of the golem, who existed centuries before him and yet with whom he shares so much.

As Yod's and Jacob's stories unfold, Piercey leads her readers through the rich details of her fictional world. Sometimes beautiful, often harsh, the landscape of He, She, and It is a vivid backdrop for Piercey's exploration of life as we may know it. Piercey's novel questions hierarchy, humanity, and community. In the end, Piercey scrutinizes the creative power of humans, and the implications of using that creative power to "play god" by making artificially intelligent beings.

While some of the reviewers of this book thought the paralell stories were confusing or contrived, I think they serve a useful narrative purpose. I found Jacob's story to be as engaging as the main plot. Additionally, one previous reviewer noted that the stereotypes were offensive. I respect this reviewer's opinion, and would like to offer my interpretation. From a practical standpoint, pidgin and creole language varieties are certainly likely to evolve in such a setting. The glop speak, which seems to be derived from no particular ethnic group, but to be a fictional slang-based language variety informed by technology and pop culture, apprears to be the lingua franca of the areas outside of the enclaves. Additionally, portraying a grandmother as a sexual being can be read different ways by readers: I prefer to read her as a woman unafraid to admit that she has desires. That, to me, is empowering.

I don't mean the title of my review title lightly. I truly do believe that this is the best novel on cyborgs or robots that I have ever read, along with Philip K. Dick's masterpiece DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SLEEP? Both books explore the question of personhood not merely by examining a central character who is a artificial human, but by looking at artificiality in human beings as well. Yod is a cyborg who has been constructed by a scientist in an independent Jewish enclave in the late 21st century. But the people in the novel are equally artificial. Some have been technically augmented to such an extent that they can't easily be considered human. Others have been altered in appearance by plastic surgery in order to conform to the latest aesthetic standards. Even the book's major character, Shira, has received multiple enhancements. Early in the book she is able to read the time off ocular implants and she, like most of the characters in the book, can go onto the Net by plugging into a plug attached to her brain. By the end of the book it isn't clear how sharply the line can be drawn between people and machines.

HE, SHE AND IT (originally titled BODY OF GLASS) is both an updating and retelling of the Golem of Prague story. In the past century this story has been communicated most famously in the Paul Wegener film (who also played the Golem), where the Golem is portrayed as more a monster than anything (though not a very good movie, it is visually unforgettable, and was one of the major influences on James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN, especially in the portrayal of the monster). Golems have appeared in a number of books, TV series, and computer games (e.g., Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel FEET OF CLAY introduces a Golem who becomes a member of the Night Watch; an episode of THE X-FILES features a Golem; and golems have features in a number of games, such as the MMORPG Asheron's Call). In Piercy's novel the parallels between the Golem of Prague and Yod are underscored in many ways, not least in Malkah's telling to Yod of the story. Just as the golem Joseph was created by Rabbi Loeb to protect the Jewish ghetto in Prague from pograms, so Yod is created to protect an independent Jewish enclave from encroachment from one of the vast corporations that control the planet. Yod is one of the most fascinating cyborgs in literature.

Many novelists have struggled to depict robots and cyborgs in convincing ways. Most novelists end up making the cyborgs pretty much indistinguishable from people. Others make the robots so mechanical as to be silly and unbelievable (I find this fault with almost all of Asimov's robots). Yod is less mechanical than Asimov's automatons, but more than inhuman. The story isn't completely immune to one of the most absurd assumptions ever made about robots and cyborgs: that they would be normally be made incapable of hurting people. The silly notion that robots would be incapable of hurting people was the fault of Asimov and his laws of robotics, some of the most nonsensical tripe ever put forward. Even a couple of seconds thought would be sufficient to make anyone realize that robots would initially be primarily created to hurt or kill humans. Most of the initial research on robots was done under the funding of DARPA, a branch of the Defense Department. Virtually all of the current research in robotics in the United States is funded by DARPA. And the U.S. military has thousands of robots on active duty. Ironically, PackBots are used in huge numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan in both armed an unarmed versions, and are made by the iRobot corporation (the makers of the Roomba vacuum cleaners), a corporation named in honor of Asimov's famous collection of short stories, stories in which he developed the silly notion of robots that would not hurt people. The most obvious use of robots is military situations where the danger to human life (at least to one's own soldiers) is minimized.

The world that Marge Piercy assumes is a fascinating one. The United States has always been characterized by an almost unreasoning fear of government. At the same time, there is far less fear of companies and corporations. I'm the opposite. I'm terrified of the moral stance of the corporate world. Interestingly, the so-called founder of American conservatism, John Adams, was, like Adam Smith (who felt that those who participated in the market should play no role in government), leery about the influence that market forces and merchants would have on democracy. He feared an economic elite and felt that the most important role of the executive branch was to resist the formation of such an economic elite. So I've always found my country's belief in a benevolent corporate world to be odd at best. While Adams was, I think, wrong in hoping that the executive branch would act as an effective deterrent to corporate influences, I do think that we in the middle class are better off pegging our hopes on government as a deterrent to the corporate world than the corporate world as a deterrent to government. Most Sci-fi writers tend to view the corporate world with a sceptical eye. In Kim Stanley Robinson's great Mars Trilogy the bad guys are the transnational corporations who control the various national governments, and who see Mars as an asset to be exploited.

In Piercy's novel, any semblance of either state or national government is nonexistent. Corporations have taken over the world. Or what is left of the world. The novel reflects the predictions of scientists of what will happen if something isn't done to reverse the effects of global warming. Coastlines are receding; people cannot go out into sunlight without danger to their health; water and air quality is dire; cities are intensely crowded. Corporations control everything and their pursuit of the small independent enclave that Yod protects is based partly on their desire to acquire the research they have been engaged in (primarily Yod himself), but mainly on their outrage of a village that exists outside of corporate influence.

This is a marvelously rich and deeply textured novel. Marge Piercy is not primarily or even especially a Sci-fi writer, even though William Gibson has credited her earlier novel WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME with directly inspiring the birth of Cyberpunk. The problem with many Sci-fi novels is that they usually don't hold up as novels. They often contain many fascinating elements, but they usually do not compare well with the best mainstream novels with the quality of their prose or with character development. This novel is simply a fine novel, not merely a Sci-fi novel. The book has generated a significant literature by feminist literary critics and is frequently cited as an important work in the discussion of cyborgs (Piercy cites Donna Haraway's important essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" as an influence on her book).

I believe that this should be read by anyone who loves books in general, but in particular by those interested in superbly written Sci-fi novels. It will also appeal to those who are interested in dystopian literature or by books that explore questions of gender in a Sci-fi context (it compares nicely with Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE in this regard). And if you are interested in great books on cyborgs and robots, this has to be on the shortest of short lists, even if that list has only one or two items.

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.

Piercy's consolidated reputation as a major American writer rests not only on her lucid verbal skills. Her uncanny ability to extrapolate significant future trends from contemporary social and cultural phenomena is a prominent facet of her work, although perhaps not since "Woman on the Edge of Tme" has she honed her cutting edges so wickedly sharp. In this complex, potentially controversial novel she draws on multinational corporations, bionics and organ piracy, post-militant feminism, drastic pollution of the environment, the proliferation of the Internet, hackers, the development of synthetic foods, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality entertainment to imagine the Earth of 2050 and, contriving an ominously plausible background for a searching story, poses numerous unsettling questions, of which the most provocative is: what constitutes a human being? For a brilliant male scientist has unlawfully built a cyborg in human form, and an equally brilliant female scientist has so sapiently programmed its personality that her granddaughter Shira falls inevitably in love with Yod, the tenth experimental model in the series, who is just what she feels a man should be. Yod's experiences are deftly reflected in a cautionary retelling of the kabbalistic legend of a Golem crudely created in Prague in 1600 to protect the Jewish ghetto, just as Yod has been made as a defense weapon for the data-base of a beleaguered free community in Piercy's disquieting next-generation world where technology marks the watershed between haves and have-nots.

"He, She, and It" will intrigue mature readers with speculative minds who also enjoy dextrous plotting, an unusual setting, and a dynamic story rife with action, original characters, and profound moral conflict.

Piercy sketches a dysfunctional society with delicious imagination. My favorite scenes take place in the savage chaos of the "Glop" (wonderful slang for "megalopolis") and the cruel antiseptic world of the "multis" (multinational corporation-states). Most of the primary novel, however, does not take place in either setting, but rather within the sanctuary of a Jewish collective that has managed to stitch together a highly self-reliant community that has managed to preserve old-fashioned virtues (regard for nature, culture, food) and defend itself against the voracious multis. A sizable part, in the form of a narrated parallel story, also takes place within the walls of the Jewish ghetto within Prague in the 1600s. I found both of these sheltering microcosms interesting, though somewhat less so than the harsher worlds outside.

But while I like this universe, and its interplay between brutality and safety, I cannot think of a single character whom I find particularly compelling. I am sure I am supposed to like Malkah, the matriarch who is by turns genius, grandmother, and libidinous free spirit, but instead I find her self-congratulatory and eventually devoid of surprises. I am also encouraged to admire warrior women Riva and Nili, and to empathize with Shira, the "everywoman" protagonist. However, the first two are caricatures, and Shira's thoughts so prosaic, repetitive, and omnipresent that I found it hard to empathize with her. Avram and Gadi are frozen in the male roles of angry father and rebellious foppy son, while Yod and Joseph, the golems of the present and past, exist more or less as the toys of the other characters. Except for the fact that Shira acquires some more self-confidence as the result of her actions, there is little along the lines of character development to be seen.

It seemed to me that wish fulfillment propelled the action: wouldn't it be wonderful to design one's own sexual partner/object, to literally take up arms against one's employer, to build a genius robot to beat back the overwhelming forces outside the ghetto walls for just a while, to join an imminent rebellion against the forces of injustice? And really, there's nothing wrong with that. I certainly enjoyed the journey. But ultimately, it felt just a bit more shallow in the realm of character than it could have been.