Marge Piercy

An excellent read, if seriously flawed. For one, nothing dates a novel like its depiction of the future. This is no exception, the whole thing felt very seventies. Second, much of the twin utopia/dystopia presented in the book is told instead of shown, an elementary crime against literature. Third, I've been spoiled by [b:The Dispossessed|13651|The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle #6)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353467455s/13651.jpg|2684122] which presented its future with a negative capability, sowing doubts by presenting the inevitable discontents within its utopia. That I agree with Piercy's premise doesn't let this book off the hook.
Still, its so very refreshing to see Rosa Luxemburg's axiom "socialism vs barbarism" brought to life so starkly. The novel's predictions align with choices our actual society faces. The fact that reality is less subtle than science fiction isn't this novel's fault, it's our own.… (more)

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.… (more)

As usual, Marge Piercy is full of interesting ideas. In this book she explores our relationship to technology, as individuals, as.communities and as a society. Her primary question concerns the notion of humanity. What does it mean to be human? What are the essential attributes? What does it mean when acknowledged human beings don't have those qualities, vut cyborgs do? What are the benefits and risks of merging the biological with the technological? Great questions for our current moment. Unfortunately Piercy ' s writing falls far short of the expectations set by her framing of her subject. It's sentimental, trite, even juvenile at many times, making it hard to get through and distracting the reader from the interesting problems Piercy ' s presented us.… (more)