Marge Piercy (March 31, 1936)

Marge Piercy's novel He, She, and It is about a golem-type entity in a computer some time in the near future. Many of its characters have a Jewish or Israeli identity, and the action takes place in partly-destroyed world after "the Two Week War a terrorist had launched with a nuclear device that had burned Jerusalem off the map, a conflagration of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that had set the oilfields aflame and destroyed the entire region." I find the use of golem motifs in modern fiction to be very intriguing, and this is one of my favorite examples.

Piercy's other novels also often have interesting secular Jewish characters, such as City of Darkness, City of Light about the French Revolution and Gone to Soldiers about World War II. I'm very fond of the way she puts Jewish characters in the books naturally, without dedicating the book to Jewish themes and concerns. In fact, she might be one of the best writers when it comes to integrating characters who just happen to be assimilated Jews into an ordinary plot.

The only book by Piercy that disappointed me was Pesach for the Rest of Us, which talks about alternative Seders, but which I found rather disorganized and lacking in focus. This one, to my knowledge, is her only explicit Jewish book.

Overall, she's a really excellent secular Jewish author-hero!

A Word on Golems in Science Fiction and other Fiction

I'm fascinated by the way the Jewish legend of the Golem has been adopted in modern literature, and in connection with Karel Capek's birthday today, I've put together a list of some of the works where golems of various sorts have appeared:

• Anthony, Piers: Golem in the Gears
• Borges, Jorge Luis: Dreamtigers
• Brin, David: Kiln People
• Chabon, Michael: Kavalier and Clay
• Davidson, Avram: “The Golem”
• Dick, Phillip: The Cosmic Puppets
• Hamill, Pete: Snow in August
• Handler, Daniel: Watch Your Mouth
• Isler, Alan: The Bacon Fancier
• Lem, Stanislav: The Golem
• Mieville, China: Iron Council
• Mulisch, Harry: The Procedure
• Piercy, Marge: He, She, and It
• Pratchett, Terry: Feet of Clay
• Rosenbaum, Thane: The Golems of Gotham
• Stroud, Jonathan: The Golem’s Eye
• Sturm, James: The Golem’s Mighty Swing

Other, more obscure books with "Golem" in the title appear in a keyword search at ABE books, and other places. I have read some of these, and plan to read more, out of curiosity about how this legend has fit so well into a modern genre, and in fact how it fictionally prefigured a whole area of modern technology.