Rating: 
Summary: More than interesting and well-written...
Review: I read this text for a Science Fiction course I took at UCLA. After reading LeGuin, Stephenson and Benford, this one was my favorite. I couldn't put the book down-- I easily became attached to the memorable characters and didn't want the story to end. This was one of those books where I wished that it wasn't just a book....
Rating:
Summary: Makes you think, but ends poorly
Review: I'm not usually one to judge a book by its ending. Certainly this one has its share to offer; likeable, interesting characters, a future with some original twists, an excellent feeling for what it is like to live in a community with reasonable comfort but no security. But the conclusion here is really quite a disappointment; not one but two plot developments are essentially cut-and-pasted from the story outline with no development. Piercy has done better.
All in all, worth a read if you like Piercy or enjoy thinking about cyborg theory ala Haraway. Otherwise, try Slow River.
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Summary: another dystopia
Review: In Peircy's future world, the small Jewish town is threatened by the large corporate enclave. Peircy un-subtley compares this with the Jewish ghetto in Prague. Enter Yod, a cyborg (and the future's version of the golem) to protect the town. With a suspenseful plot and well-developed characters, this book is an enjoyable read.
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Summary: A Different Twist
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Like myth? Sci-fi? Adventure? And yeah...romance?
Review: Marge Piercy blends the myth of the Golem of Prague with futuristic sci-fi to make a totally entertaining story (whether it's believable or not is not a concern of mine). It's a cliche, but I couldn't put it down. Most of her novels are only a step or 2 above beach-blanket romances, but this one shows depth and research. Her second-best, totally different: "Gone to Soldiers" (WWII). Check that out, too
Rating: 
Summary: He, She and It from a Technological Perspective
Review: 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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Summary: only the ending prevents 5 stars
Review: 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...
Rating: 
Summary: Logically Bad Science Fiction
Review: 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:
Summary: State-of-the-art humanity
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: One of my top 5 life-long reads
Review: The books spans over 600 years, and yet makes sense at both ends! Peircy takes what we now now as "The Internet" (which didn't even exist when she wrote this book) and extends it to its logical conclusion--a direct plug-in directly to the human brain. An awesome thought as I sit here typing away.
No one I have recommended this book to yet has come away with a negative comment--they have come away with new thoughts and questions...
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