When William Gibson's Neuromancer defined the cyberpunk future — masculine, individualist, corporate — Marge Piercy wrote an answer. He, She and It (1991), published in the UK as Body of Glass and winner of both the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the James Tiptree Junior Award, is set in a drowned, corporation-ruled 2059, where a handful of free towns survive outside the multis' reach. One of them is Tikva — Hebrew for hope — a self-governing Jewish community that has built a cyborg named Yod, programmed with both a woman's and a man's mentality, strong enough to kill and gentle enough to love. Shira Shipman, newly returned home after losing custody of her son to a corporate-backed ex-husband, is tasked with teaching him to be human. Running in parallel, Shira's grandmother Malkah tells Yod the story of the Golem of Prague: around 1600, the Maharal shaped a man from river clay to protect the Jewish ghetto, but in Piercy's telling it is Chava, the rabbi's granddaughter, who teaches him to read and write — a woman the official story forgets. The parallel is never decoration. Joseph and Yod are both created to protect a vulnerable people, taught their humanity by women the record erases, and ultimately unmade by the communities that needed them. At the climax, Yod destroys himself — and the blueprints — so that nothing like him can be built as a weapon again. Shira finds his notes afterward and, honouring his request, destroys them too. Piercy gives Donna Haraway's 1985 cyborg manifesto a body, asking whether a made mind can vote in a town meeting, count in a minyan, or be owned by the person who built it. The answer the book offers is uncomfortable: you can be essential and still be property.SPOILERS! Please note that due to the nature of this podcast, each episode describes a novel in detail, including plot spoilers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
