[In the following review, Bosse offers negative assessment of He, She, and It.]

Her highly praised novel Gone to Soldiers and her other works of fiction, essays and poetry attest to Marge Piercy's achievement. But her ambitious new novel, He, She and It, is not likely to enhance her reputation.

In the high-tech world of A.D. 2059, people live under protective domes because of an ecological disaster and plug into computers through sockets located in their foreheads. This society, although it is described in the lingo of science fiction （gruds, stimmies, security apes, fused user syndrome）, still has a familiar assortment of domestic problems. The brilliant young scientist Shira battles her former husband for custody of their son, Art, but unfortunately for Shira the despotic, male-dominated multinational corporation that employs her—and administers justice—rules against her. She moves to a “free town” where she stays with her grandmother and works on an artificial-intelligence project concerned with the construction of cyborgs.

Malkah, Shira's grandmother, opens a second narrative line by explaining to Yod, a newly created cyborg, what life for oppressed Jews was like in 16th-century Prague. Malkah's narrative includes complex disquisitions on astrology, the cabala, medieval science and the intellectual fervor of Central Europe during the Renaissance. But her tale focuses on Judah Loew, the head rabbi of Prague, who creates a golem, a man made from clay and invested with life, “as tall and broad as the strongest soldier.” The rabbi names his creation Joseph and charges it with protecting the city's Jews （gathered together in a walled ghetto） from intruders.

Malkah has been recruited to work with the cyborg by its creator, her old lover Avram. Yod is unique, far superior to any other cyborg. Much like the golem in Malkah's tale, he has been created to protect an endangered community—in this case the town to which Shira flees. As Yod explains to Shira, “I am not a robot. … I'm a fusion of machine and lab-created components.” He is dark-haired, “of medium height, with a solid compact build,” and, he explains to an astonished Shira, “anatomically male.”

Shira is given the job of civilizing the cyborg. And—much as in Malkah's tale of 16th-century Prague, in which a young woman takes pity on the golem and his “beautiful hunger” for knowledge and teaches him to read—she finds herself fascinated by Yod.

Assassins from an enemy coalition, Yakamura-Stichen （recalling the Axis of World War II）, who can strike through a computer to kill its user, attack Malkah. She is saved by Yod. Shira and Yod begin a steamy love affair. Because the free town is now under siege, Shira's mother, Riva, returns to help out. Riva is an information pirate （“She finds hidden knowledge,” Malkah explains to Shira, “and liberates it”） who brings with her a formidable accomplice, Nili, a Ninja-like woman warrior who comes from an underground cave beneath Israel, where a community of Jewish and Palestinian women live together in harmony. From this complex and rather funky domestic setting, a plot emerges to rescue Shira's child from her former husband.

Both Joseph the golem and Yod face violence and must kill to protect their charges. The golem fights off the forces threatening the Jews of the Prague ghetto: Yod first helps the women penetrate an enemy base through its computer to track down Shira's son, then proves essential in saving the boy.

Once Joseph has heroically saved the Prague ghetto from a vicious mob, the rabbi, through ritual chanting, returns the golem to inanimate clay. The fate of Yod is similar, although it is he who destroys himself, along with the laboratory in which he was created, so that enslaved machines won't be made to act as weapons against their will.

Shira is initially determined to create a new lover from a data base, but she finally decides that enough tampering with free will has already been done, so she destroys the records that would allow the creation of more cyborgs like Yod.

Marge Piercy confronts large issues in this novel: the social consequences of creating anthropomorphic cyborgs, the dynamics of programming both humans and machines, the ethical question of our control of machines that might feel as well as think.

At the present time, virtual reality experiments promise many startling changes in society. But Ms. Piercy's high-tech world of the near future is filled with wonders that stretch credulity. People transform their looks within a computer program, then emerge with their shapes permanently changed. Or they are zipped physically by some kind of teleportation from one place to another.

Perhaps one problem is that the details of He, She and It are cribbed, as Ms. Piercy acknowledges in an afterword, from the genre of science fiction known as cyberpunk, without the introduction of believable characters, men and women acutely aware of the extraordinary possibilities of a computer-mediated world. Most of the figures in this novel are described as being brilliant, their scholarship great, their minds superior, yet they behave like rather ordinary characters, exhausted by domestic and romantic problems, in a plot that is intermittently frenetic and weird and that is frequently reminiscent of a video game. Surprises abound, though the rationale behind them is often contrived and only too familiar. Shira's mother, killed before Shira's eyes in a raid, surfaces again; someone else's corpse had been substituted for hers. Love affairs develop easily and quickly in a game of musical beds that fails to engage our interest.

Some of the prose belies Ms Piercy's reputation as a poet: “Her heart collapsed like a crushed egg”; “She felt a roiling hot mixture of emotions, like a pot of thick fudge about to boil over”; “Nili cracked her knuckles sensually”; “It is a torment like fire in his mind.”

The parallel stories of the golem and the cyborg, both created by men to serve humankind, initially offer a welcome strategy for varying the book's time and setting. Yet the heavy symbolism, unrelieved by humor, retards the pace of both narratives until He, She and It, despite its complicated plot and use of Buck Rogers fantasy, often reads more like an extended essay on freedom of conscience than a full-rigged work of fiction.