Marge Piercy

Brilliant for its time. I may have loved it then. Or maybe not, because I was naive about brutality to women, about racism, about prostitution, welfare, mental hospitals, homosexuality, poverty, etc. Consuelo's suffering is horrible and now that I know more about such issues I don't want to read about it in my fiction. Especially at such length. Especially because the women have absolutely no agency. Even at the end, Consuelo muses that if "they" had left her just one thing to love, she would go on being meek, done anything, taken any abuse.... I just can't empathize.

There's def. some brilliant bits here. I mean, I read to p. 80 and skimmed towards the end. I found someone trying to get "Connie" to say 'sit' instead of 'seet' but it's subtly revealed that she could only say "Consoolo."

And consider this line near the beginning: "Into the asylum that offered none, the broken-springed bus roughly galloped."

But I could find none of the kind of SF that I prefer - (most) early feminist literary SF is not my thing because it (often) doesn't consider that men were (are) also subject to expectations & pressures, and are real people, and are potential partners instead of enemies.

Also this reminds me of [b:Sultana's Dream|910679|Sultana's Dream And Selections from The Secluded Ones|Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328767331l/910679._SY75_.jpg|42163669], a simple comparison of two societies... I've already said how the brutality of Consuelo's familiar life is written about at length, and I guess there's kind of a story there, but I don't see a story developing in the future as it seems to be all about them explaining to her how much better it is to live in their Utopia... I don't even see that I missed anything about how that Utopia came to be. Certainly something huge had to have happened for them to forget concepts like "father" and "police." (Yes, they apparently have records of those concepts in archives, but don't children learn any history? Doesn't anyone read any classic literature?)

Thank goodness we've made a lot of progress since the day when this was published.

I wouldn't mind reading a book discussion of this. But only if I could lurk, or maybe ask questions, not if I were expected to actually finish reading the darn thing.… (more)

May 2021
Borrowed because the title intrigued. Did not remember why I dnf'd the author's most famous time travel novel.
Was feeling dissatisfied until I finally figured out why, p. 46.
The poems are too accessible, too easy, at least for me (and I am not educated nor a snob). They've really not much more depth or sophistication than rock/pop lyrics... and they don't have the music to provide the 'hook.' Also the content doesn't particularly enchant me. The first two thirds of the book are these 'everyday' poems.
The rest is the poems about the moon, and women. I felt very much under the influence of womyn who wear henna and light candles and belong to a tribe etc... not for me.… (more)

This is a story I should relate to: a working woman who is stressed as she deals with her adult daughter returning home and her mother who has a stroke and needs home care. But Suzanne is hyperfocused on her work as an attorney, Elena seems such a spoiled directionless 29 yr old, and too much of the novel consists of people's thoughts. Suzanne thinks too much about her failed relationships and whether to get involved again with a man. There is a lot of drama in the flashback scenes from Elena's youth (in fact, in much of Elena's thoughts, also) and in the scenes of marital infidelity. On the plus side, it depicts dealing with her mother's desire for assisted suicide, which is not your ordinary theme, and Piercy continues to have characters who step outside the usual conventions (Beverly was a union organizer & unwed mother in 1950's) and challenge women's cultural roles.[return]Each chapter is told from a different/alternating woman's point of view, with the character identified in a subheading under the chapter number. I am neutral about the effectiveness of this style.[return]I haven't decided if I'll keep the book: Piercy became my favorite author when I read Woman on the Edge of Time when it first came out, but this novel isn't as imaginative or perception-stretching.… (more)

I loved [b:Woman on the Edge of Time|772888|Woman on the Edge of Time|Marge Piercy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480498743l/772888._SY75_.jpg|838570] so had high expectations of 'He, She, and It' (Oxford comma added for my own sake). I did not find it quite as memorably powerful, because [b:Woman on the Edge of Time|772888|Woman on the Edge of Time|Marge Piercy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480498743l/772888._SY75_.jpg|838570] contrasts contemporary, utopian, and dystopian visions so brilliantly. Nonetheless, 'He, She, and It' is fascinating and thoughtful sci-fi. It is largely set mid-21st century, when megacorporations have taken over and ruined the planet. Wealthier and luckier people live either under protective domes for corporate workers or more precarious wraps sheltering rare independent settlements; most of the population survives in chaotic slums, unpleasantly named the Glop. In a more conventional cyberpunk novel, the plot would be split between corporate domes and the slums. As Piercy is a distinctively thoughtful writer, she centres her story on a small independent Jewish community named Tikva. Shira, the protagonist, loses custody of her son and leaves her corporate job, returning to live with her grandmother in Tikva. There she meets long-lost family, her first love, and a unique cyborg called Yod. The focus of the book is on Shira's relationships, in particular with Yod. Despite the novel's title, though, gender isn't given much consideration.

In parallel to Shira's narrative, her grandmother tells the story of the golem of Prague. Yod is a 21st century golem, built to protect Tikva, a 21st century Jewish ghetto. The independence of the settlement is continually threatened by corporations, who frequently resort to murder for espionage purposes. As this is a cyberpunk-ish world, people can get their brains fried while jacked into the mainframe. But that is incidental to the exploration of personhood, both of Joseph the golem and Yod the cyborg. A complex web of familial, romantic, and community relationships is carefully developed around them both. I particularly appreciated the thoughtful consideration of duty and morality as applied to Joseph and Yod. Both were created to protect a community from deadly violence, with the implicit sanction to use deadly violence themselves. As they learn and develop, golem and cyborg become more inclined to independent thought. They become frustrated by those who treat them purely as tools and drawn to those who treat them as people. Despite the incremental pace, which allows the characters and their relationships to flower, 'He, She, and It' is very neatly structured. The denouement of Yod and Shira's story isn't unexpected, yet has no less impact for that. I found it very involving and enjoyed the absence any clear ethical conclusions. It felt like an ongoing discussion between the interesting cast of characters, as there are never going to be definitive answers to the questions it raises.… (more)