He, She, and It is a science fiction novel by Marge Piercy published in 1991. It is considered by critics to be a good example of a specific type of science fiction: cyberpunk. Cyberpunk literature and film is typically set in a dystopian future in which technology runs amok and the world is dominated by corporate interests. What makes Piercy’s novel a particularly interesting example of cyberpunk is that is also suggests the possibility of a utopian future. The world has been destroyed but there are efforts to learn from past mistakes and heal the planet.
The novel might also be classified as a “hard science fiction” novel. Hard science fiction distinguishes itself from regular science fiction in that the author strives to depict a world, and a kind of science, that is plausible and based on established findings in physics, biology, cybernetics, etc. The fact that the novel is a work of hard science fiction is somewhat dispiriting because what it predicts, in terms of destruction of the planet, seems all too plausible. He, She, and It is set in the middle of the 21st century, in which the planet has been nearly destroyed by nuclear war, and poisoned by chemical and biological warfare. Following what Piercy calls the Two Week War—which is started when a terrorist nukes Jerusalem, drawing the Middle-East into a devastating war—radiation pervades the atmosphere, and oil can no longer be drilled, which has ruined the global economy.
Piercy describes other, related, problems. Global temperatures have risen, causing flooding of coastal areas, and turning “bread-basket” food-producing areas into desert. She calls this “the greenhouse effect,” which is an old name for global warming. This has led to devastating famines in which most of the world’s population perishes, and outbreaks of new diseases such as the Kisrami Plague. Also, the ozone layer has been shredded, making life outside of shelter or wraps (permeable covers of entire cities) extremely dangerous because of deadly ultraviolet rays. There is also acid rain. Much of this is a very plausible part of the future of the planet. Some of it, according to scientists, is already happening. I’m talking about global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, and peak oil.
Like any good science fiction writer, Piercy gives us a fully-realized world. The all-too-plausible dystopian elements are part of this. Also part of it are the places, both physical and virtual, that Piercy describes. The novel gives us a United States which is mostly desert, with the rest of the habitable space filled by sprawling metropolises which are lawless zones filled with violence and disease (the Glop). There are also corporate enclaves where the privileged live (multis). There are off-planet satellites (where Shira’s ex-husband takes their child). There are free towns like Tikva where inhabitants are allowed freedom because they produce things that the multis need. In the case of Tikva, they produce computer hardware and software. Avram works in artificial intelligence (and cyborgs). Malkah works in chimeras (deceptive computer programs). These, we learn, are very desirable to the powerful corporations. In this world, as Nili remarks in the novel, “the ability to access information is power” (194). The ability to manipulate information, and to use information to deceive, is also power. This, also, is a fairly accurate description of the world today in regards to the power of information to control people, and its centrality in the global economy.
There are also virtual spaces described in the novel. Piercy writes about a world-wide Net, very similar to the internet, which is free and open to anyone. In her world there are also corporate and town Bases, very similar to the kind of massive databases that Google administers, which are closely guarded. Most people access the Net and Bases by way of “projection” in which electric wires connect computers to a port in the head of the person who wishes to jack into the system.
This is one thing that might have seemed likely in 1991, when Piercy wrote her novel, but now of course we live in a world where people communicate, and travel, virtually without wires using mobile devices. It seems likely that Piercy, were she writing her novel today, would envision wireless access to the Net and the Bases, by way of circuitry surgically implanted in people’s heads. Because that’s probably where we’re headed. (I’ll note that another science fiction author, Samuel Delany, in Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand—published in 1984—describes the kind of wireless access I mention above).
But in Piercy’s world, people do more than just cower under cover trying to survive and interface with technology. Piercy’s description of the various forms of entertainment on her ruined planet is also fully realized, and not too far removed from our entertainments today. Many people watch “stimmies,” which are three-dimensional and thus immersive stories. Stimmies are similar to virtual reality spaces already in existence which are accessed by way of virtual reality suits and helmets. An even more immersive form of stimmies are “spikes,” in which the “player” can actually interject him or herself into the action. These games are highly addictive and can lead to a situation in which the player gets lost in the game while his or her body starves to death. There are also 3-D holographic spaces to play in. These come in the form of “holos” or “virons” (you’ll recall that Gadi, in the novel, designs virons). These virons are also incorporated into stimmies and spikes. In Piercy’s world, nearly everyone can afford stimmies, but if they can’t there are also highly addictive hallucinogenic drugs which are affordable and available. There are also “flat films” which are like the films we see today. But there doesn’t not seem to be anything resembling television. Nor are there print newspapers, magazines, or books. All of these can be accessed in digital form on the Net.
The hard-science aspect of the novel also applies to the social sciences. Piercy seems a fairly accomplished amateur anthropologist in her novel. She describes with great detail (or “granularity”) the social and cultural institutions of different parts of her world, including the multis, the Glop, and egalitarian free towns like Tikva. Her explanation of the dystopian economics of the future Earth are particularly convincing. It would be interesting to read an economist’s take on Piercy’s dystopian economics. However, I would hope people at major corporations would steer clear of this novel, because I think they would learn too much how to control places and people in the event of a world disaster such as that described by Piercy.
I should add, on the subject of fictional anthropology, the role of Judaism in the book is quite unique. It’s not something that you would find in other science fiction novels. This futuristic Judaism, and Piercy’s description of the subculture of post-dystopia Jewish communities like Tikva and the one from which Nili comes from in Israel, is very well developed and quite plausible. This is true as well for the history of Judaism in the book. Roughly a third of the novel is set in Prague in the year 1600, featuring the Rabbi Judah Loew and the Golem, a legendary figure in Jewish history. The story of the Golem is legendary, but Piercy’s take on Jewish life in early modern Europe is quite accurate. It was certainly not an easy time or place to be Jewish.
Piercy is also a pretty decent political scientist, based one what we read in her novel. The corporate-based geopolitical power games she writes about are, for the most part, extensions of current political reality. They reveal Piercy’s political investments as well, since she clearly favors the more egalitarian democratic structures such as those in Tikva. Piercy was a progressive political activist before she was a novelist, and most of her novels show that influence. In this regard, the most prominent would be Vida, which is about a Weather Underground type activist living underground, and City of Light, City of Darkness which relates the events of the French Revolution through the perspective of the women who were involved. Woman on the Edge of Time also reflects Piercy’s leftist politics in her depiction of a future world that is quite similar to He, She, and It.
However, it is not as an anthropologist or a political activist that we read He, She, and It in a digital literature class. Rather, it is because she touches upon many of the themes, and the media, we discuss in our class. First of all, it’s important that He, She, and It is a book. I began the semester talking about the book as a form of technology. I hope you have read it with that in mind. When you do so, you see that there are some things about Piercy’s story that would not completely translate to a digital format. You also see that Piercy really knows how to use the technology of the book format to tell her story. And like any good novel in the format of a book, she knows how to use character and plot to immerse the reader in the story.
She also makes reading, particularly novels, a theme within her story. Remember that a big reason that Yod does not run amok like previous versions of the cyborg was that he was socialized by Malkah and Shira. An important component of this is his reading. First of all, he reads Malkah’s story, which is written for him. He reads a lot of other poetry and fiction. He explicitly reads novels in order to learn about the psychology of humans. Critics and historians of the novel would no doubt applaud this touch, since the novel—in English anyway—was a product of a new kind of human subjectivity, and tended to be highly psychological. One of the novels he reads to understand humans, and his human side, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (another reason why we read He, She, and It in this class). Yod reads Frankenstein after Gadi refers to it, and thinks himself monstrous. Shira disabuses him of this notion. She says: “You were not created out of some mad ambition of Avram’s to become a god. You’re not cobbled out of human garbage. You were created to protect a vulnerable and endangered community” (150). Besides this disavowal, it is clear that Piercy wants the reader to make connections between her cyborg and Shelley’s Creature. She also makes the strained relationship between Yod and his creator Avram at the center of her story. As you recall, this was also at the center of Shelley’s story, though it has been de-emphasized or removed from television and film versions.
Piercy’s novel is, as mentioned, is an immersive read, but it also describes with great accuracy the experience of technologically-enhanced immersion—which she calls “projection”—and the problems related to it. You may not remember, but Shira’s main area of expertise is on the psychology of projection, in particular the way that experience can be damaging to people. Much of the action in the novel occurs in the virtual world of projection. This includes a lot of action, some of it violent, and all of it believable to anyone who has played console video games.
What Piercy does really well is investigate the psychological, philosophical, and existential condition of the immersive virtual experience. Part of this is the way people play with identity while projected. For instance, Malkah plays around with gender while projected, taking on the virtual vesture of a man, and encourages Shira to play around with her online identity in similar ways. In the novel, shape-shifting is common online; Yod is particularly ingenious as a shape-shifter (and “chimeras,” which Malkah works on, are also forms of shape-shifting). Though in this class we aren’t really “projected,” we still deal with the existential issues of identity online—in the ways people might abuse the amorphous nature of identity (Mr. Bungle in the LambdaMOO), and the ways they might use it to create characters (such as in many of the fiction blogs and wikis, as well as faux Facebook and Twitter).
Finally, we read He, She, and It to get a better understanding of cyborgs. Piercy’s Yod is one of the better evocations of the cyborg in fiction. As a character, he’s very well-developed, believable, and sympathetic. But more importantly he dramatizes the hopes and fears of the cyborg, and particularly the uneasy balance between machine and embodied person. In the end, he realizes that as an experiment in creating a sentient weapon he is a failure because such an entity is an impossible contradiction. A weapon that can feel the pain he or she inflicts will never be an effective weapon, which is why Yod takes the drastic action of destroying himself, his creator, and all the documentation of how he came to be. No creatures should be subjected to such an existential dilemma.
Yod is not the only cyborg in the novel. Nili is also a cyborg, though more human than machine (Yod is arguably more machine than human). But just about everyone else in the novel is also a cyborg. In a technologically sophisticated world, such as that described in the novel, we are all cyborgs. Shira expresses this on a number of occasions in the novel, most eloquently in this passage when she responds to Yod after he suggests he is “unnatural”:
Yod, we’re all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney…. I couldn’t begin to survive without my personal base: I wouldn’t know who I was. We can’t go unaided into what we haven’t yet destroyed of “nature.” Without a wrap, without sec skins and filters, we’d perish. We’re all cyborgs, Yod. You’re just a purer form of what we’re all tending toward. (150)
Think about your own dependence on technology, such as whatever machine you’re using to read this. In this sense, Piercy’s future is now.
