Thoughts on reading He, She and It by Marge Piercy.

In the wake of chatGPT and seemingly at the doorsteps of an AI revolution, returning to Marge Piercy’s He, She and It allows for a thoughtful exploration into the composition of a human intelligence; amalgamating the Jewish folklore of the Golem of Prague with with Piercy’s classical mix of second wave feminism, environmental alarmism, and dystopian science fiction storytelling.

Piercy is an adept worldbuilder, able to simultaneously create a paranoid and anxious 17th century Prague and a technologically advanced yet socially depressed 21st century. In the former world, Piercy’s Prague has all the lovable characteristics of Ashkenazic folklore, as inside the Ghetto’s walls we are introduced to an eclectic cast of characters revolving around the charming, religious, and mystic Maharal. In the latter world, Piercy taps into her vast imagination and conjures an early 21st century comprised of corporate enclaves and free towns with technology eerily similar to the modern day (highlighted by feminine personal computer voice assistants). However, Piercy’s worldbuilding is not without faults. The makeup of the ‘Glop’ (mass slums in extreme environmental decay and riddled with turf wars) is uncomfortably comprised of a dark skinned workers that speak a slang spanglish dialect. This of course is contrasted with those living in the ‘Multi’s’ (metropolises run pseudo-governmental multinational corporations), where to largest problem for the white upper class is a loss of freedom to the ruling bodies. As in Woman on the Edge of Time, Piercy lacks the nuance and fineness to tackle complex racial issues, and comes across as do many in her generation: pitying those of differing race – accepting for granted, rather than challenging, the racial status quo in United States of America.

He, She and It is at its best when the the humanity of Joseph the Golem and Yod the Cyborg are explored. Through the journey of becoming a being, Piercy gives each ‘it’ two sources of intelligence: tangible information, Joseph via talmudic and halakcic studies and Yod via internet archives, and social conditioning, Joseph conditioned by the sweet Chevra and Yod by Shira. Throughout the story, Piercy builds a thesis that it is these two forms of intelligence, scientific and social, that define a human, not any biological organs (of course, this argument can be extrapolated to the idea that a human may just be a machine, but that is for another day). Unfortunately, Piercy again falls into the reductive thinking of her era, having each ‘it’ given its scientific education by male creators and each ‘it’ social conditioned by a female caretaker.

Though He, She and It is certainly outdated and offensive, Piercy is able to use wonderful worldbuilding and charismatic characters to comment on the nature of intelligence, and what it truly means to be a human.