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A review by rebeccacider
He, She and It by Marge Piercy
2.0
Read this on a lark because I am halfway through writing my own human/robot love story and wanted to see how this classic work tackled it. Normally reading fiction similar to what you're writing is a terrible idea, but my story is well enough established that I decided to indulge my curiosity.
I enjoyed the B-plot of this novel, in which one of the characters retells the story of the Golem of Prague. The main narrative lost my interest about halfway through.
Before I picked up the title, I came across controversy about whether literary writers like Piercy, Atwood, etc. write "real" SF/F. I wrestled with this question for a while before setting it aside as irrelevant. There's plenty of successful genre fiction written for a general or literary audience. Piercy's cyberpumk-inspired world isn't very original, but I don't think original worldbuilding makes or breaks a story. She infodumps on every other page, but some genre writers do that all the time (especially in cyberpunk!)
So the reason I didn't care for this book isn't because it's bad science fiction (it might be, but whatever). It's because the characters stopped surprising me and the central ideas of the book didn't take me anywhere I hadn't been before.
I enjoyed the B-plot of this novel, in which one of the characters retells the story of the Golem of Prague. The main narrative lost my interest about halfway through.
Before I picked up the title, I came across controversy about whether literary writers like Piercy, Atwood, etc. write "real" SF/F. I wrestled with this question for a while before setting it aside as irrelevant. There's plenty of successful genre fiction written for a general or literary audience. Piercy's cyberpumk-inspired world isn't very original, but I don't think original worldbuilding makes or breaks a story. She infodumps on every other page, but some genre writers do that all the time (especially in cyberpunk!)
So the reason I didn't care for this book isn't because it's bad science fiction (it might be, but whatever). It's because the characters stopped surprising me and the central ideas of the book didn't take me anywhere I hadn't been before.