After I saw “A.I.” last week, the conversation on one of my mailing lists turned to the movie. One member commented that the Mechas represent the Jewish people: always living in the shadow, and the sufferance of the gentiles. That comment made me get out my copy of Marge Piercy’s He, She and It.
The novel contains two stories. In the first, a young woman returns to her home, a Jewish enclave in New England, after her marriage ends. What’s significant here is that this is mid-21st century New England in a world wrecked by global warming, emergent disease, and a nuclear exchange that reduced the Middle East to a cinder. And while the Jewish people are blamed for a war started by a zealot. Her home town makes prized security software used by multinational companies to defend their networks.
The other story is that of the Golem of Prauge; as told by the woman’s grandmother to a cyborg created to help defend the town’s networks and programmers from physical and virtual attack by the same companies to whom they sell their wares.
