rative are Malkah's messages to Yod, including a bedtime story about the creation of a golem in the Jewish ghetto of Prague--a golem who protected the community against raids but who guaranteed his own demise by falling in love with a human woman. Y-S wants Yod and tries to use Shira's son as a hostage to get her to betray her community. But Shira has fallen in love with the android. As the golem's tale foreshadowed, many complications follow.
             While I found some parts of He, She and It from Marge Piercy rather dull, I think it does raise some interesting questions (as an aside I have read other works by the author that show her to be a more capable writer). Yod a machine, though physically built to appear male. What are the social consequences of creating anthropomorphic cyborgs? What is the ethical dilemma of our control of machines that might feel and think? This novel offers a twist on the Frankenstein model. A man in essence playing God creates Yod. Avram is much like Victor Frankenstein thinking of only the act of creating life and not it's consequences. To Avram, Yod no matter how human seeming is still a thing to be controlled at his discretion
             . But Yod is not content to simple be a half copy of a person. He yearns to learn and be "alive." Through Shira's relationship with Yod, first as teacher and than as lover, Peircy reverses an age-old pattern of sexual roles. Here "the "male" becomes more "feminine" and his needing intimacy and desiring to please his mate sexually, has us raising questions about the nature of gender and sexuality. An additional irony, Piercy is giving us a scenario in which a woman is free to program her ideal of the masculine, a reversal of the traditional order in our society. Yod does in fact become an "it." Unlike the Frankenstein monster, Yod is a balance of the masculine and feminine. The way Yod's body interacts with the world, coupled...