I have not read anything like it before. There's an undercurrent of hope along with something much more systemic and deep than just melancholy. It is explicit but not gratuitous and the matter-of-fact authorial voice gives equal weight to the best and worst moments of Jonny's life leading up to his return to the reservation. One of my favorite books in recent memory.

“My home is full of hope and ghosts.”

“No one born now will experience the world of gentle air we could walk through on impulse, without protection, winds and rain that caressed our skin, deep thick woods, grass like green hair growing thick from the moist earth. We were killing the world, but it was not yet dead.”

It is no surprise that at the end of He, She & It, the author, Marge Piercy, acknowledges A Cyborg Manifesto. Written by Donna Haraway in 1985, is critical of traditional notions of feminism and hoped to empower writers to move past the conventional notions of gender, among other things. Never had this manifesto been more taken to heart and explored by an author until He, She, & It.
Shira lives in a corporate city with rigid structures and rules that stamp out that systemically gaslight her on every front of her life. Her work is undervalued on purpose. Divorce procedures for her and her husband favor him. In an act of contempt and malice, he takes their son. Left with nothing, Shira goes home to her mother and town entrenched in traditional Jewish to face old relationships and old pain she has been running from all her life.

“Information shouldn’t be a commodity. That’s obscene. Information plus theology plus political bias is how we sculpt our view of reality.”

At the same time, a cyborg, a man, is created in the town Tikvah she now goes back to, and her grandmother, Malkah, who raised Shira, helps to program Yod. Where other cyborgs crafted by a brilliant scientist have gone mad and failed, Yod seems to thrive because of the genius programming of Malkah; which instills femininity in the cyborg, bringing a balance to the programming.

As Yod is discovering himself for the first time and Shira is rediscovering herself in her roots, another story unravels: an old story, told by Malkah in the form of a story left for Yod in the town’s network (this books version of cyberspace). The story is of a rabbi in the 1600s living in Prague who has conceived of creating a golem that would protect the Jews from their oppressors. When Joseph is created, however, it becomes clear that he possesses a mind and a will. One which is constrained in the same manner as the ghetto limits the Jews who live there.

“I cannot always distinguish between myth and reality, because myth forms reality and we act out what we think we are’ we know on many levels truths that are irrational as well as reasoned or experimental. Our minds help create the world we think we inhabit.”

This story parallels the main story and has elements of Jewish folklore and cultural history that is both fascinating and works very well to show technology in this future world as a kind of foil for the unknown. As well as how the unknown is always dealt with. In the past and the future, the golem and cyborg encounter similar problems and similar growth that further lends context that becomes pertinent when the question of both man’s humanity.

Shira struggles with being a tool for the corporation as it becomes clear that her losing her son and her choice to return home may be a part of a larger game of factions. Yod struggles with being designed as a tool and a weapon when he views himself as a man, and it becomes clear to anyone that chooses to interact with him that as he learns, much like a child, it is not his functions that define him, but almost everything but them. And this same struggle is mirrored in the past with Joseph, of course. Which creates a growing tension in both stories.

“Everything felt…unregulated. How unstimulated her senses had been all those Y-S years. How cold and inert that corporate Shira seemed as she felt herself loosening.”

As both stories unravel, the characters embody the author's exploration of feminist ideas that are at the most interesting in Yod. The only reason Yod can have a steady mind at all is because Malkah has imprinted into him what a mother might. Where other models solely possessed the scientist’s objectives and personality that was ideal for their being able to protect the town and be an effective weapon, the humanity of the very thing he creates never occurs to him.

“A weapon should not be conscious. A Weapon should not have the capacity to suffer for what it does, to regret, to feel guilt…”

Nor would does it seem to in the case of Joseph. There is a horror in realizing that neither creator understands the importance of the femininity in a person. They appear blind when they look inward to themselves, unable to reach the self-awareness that the interactions they most cherish stem from interactions with their family; particularly the women in their lives, and how they soften from their self-destructive attitudes around them. Yet they choose to create another being and bind the person to themselves only. Where their children are given over to their mothers in other to be made proper men. Their inventions relegated to their task and work; their humanity continually denied. Is it any wonder that the cyborgs before Yod; before Malkah went mad?

“…an artificial person created as a tool is a painful contradiction.”

The women in the story do not exist only to embody these qualities and illicit this exploration. They all struggle themselves with their own notions of femininity. Shira with the cultural reprogramming from living in corporate society for so long. Malkah is almost the opposite of her, dwelling in masculine qualities and taking pride in going against the grain in her keen sense of sexuality that is predominate in every relationship she has ever formed. Each intuitively knows that a person needs masculine and feminine qualities. Or else be lost.

This exploration for the sense of self is never-ending, exemplified in the stories of the multi-generational, globally spanning women of the family; but also in every character. Cyberspace, a place for the mind to express its creativity, particularly in the case of problem-solving. Is similarly different from more masculine cyberpunk works. It is merely a medium, the inherent technophobia is not present at all. The thing to fear most, and fear you should, in He, She & It is always man and the systemic problems that comes with them. As long as the systems that run our lives embody the masculine, we are all doomed to a madness that serves only the creators.

“Men so often try to be inhumanly powerful, efficient, unfeeling, to perform like a machine, it is ironic to watch a machine striving to be a male.”

"Who do you love?"

Although published in 1991 the world of Synners and L.A in the late 80's still feels relevant. More relevant than a lot of cyberpunk, even late first wave ones such as this. Pat Cadigan missed the normal technological advancements the genre is known for such as: cell phones. But reading it doesn't feel archaic though, maybe because it's a hard, purposeful look at nostalgia itself.

"The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn't. Or rather it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense."

GridLid automates your car completely even handles all the traffic jams, resulting in people being fearful of non-automated systems, never having driven "manually" before. Entertainment is imbibed while the bumper-to-bumper traffic takes you hours to get to work. There is porn for everything. Traffic porn, med porn, war porn, food porn. People get off on most anything that's packaged as entertainment. And the stuff that isn't trending now, is gone. Viruses are prevalent and are just a hazard of the world; most people don't know how to get rid of them. Discarding technical know-how for the ease of products automating their lives.

That's where the punks come in, the hackers.

"If you can't fuck it and it doesn't dance. Eat it or throw it away."

A slow build up hampers the book at first. Most of the pages are reserved for introductions to each. Though effective in the long term, it does take a while to get into it. But once it's done showing you the characters and by proxy, the world—the book is undeniably richer for it.

Where Synners is so interesting compared to some other first wave novels (beyond the world building aspects) is that there is kind of a post-cyberpunk vibe happening throughout, intentional or otherwise.

"We don't grieve for what might have been in rock'n'roll. We just keep rockin' on."

Gina is old enough to remember and venerate "properly," rock'n'roll music. This lauding of a wave that died out, along with the notion that "punk" is also dead is a consistent through line, reinforced with vivid imagery of music videos and lyrics from songs that just won't leave her alone. She is stuck in a self destructive loop that is explained by the impulses of the human body, rooting her problems in her humanity. Her pain seems to stem from her embodiment, yet she still wouldn't change a thing. Hard life, hard love, hard everything.

"Back in Mexico, when he first put the wires in when you were there. If you'd leaned down then, put your mouth on his, he might have stayed. Because after that nothing could pull him back, not love, not sex, not you. Not nothing, not no-how."

Visual Mark on the other hand chooses the "datalines" (the Internet) instead. Once a close couple, madly in love, eating each other up—now mature and unable to carry on with their relationship; effectively due to the past. Their mistakes, their nostalgia for them, and the various forms of coping so they don't ever have to deal with it, all damning of the societal structures in place. Mark unwilling to take true responsibility for them, instead shrugging them off to the system.

"He was still wondering what would become of him when he felt the first shock wave, followed by the last message he would ever receive from the meat."

The main thrust of the book is that "sockets" are invented, which would also be antiquated tech in most cyberpunk novels, and the world dives right in because capitalism. Diversifications, a megacorporation disseminates this new and unsafe tech to the masses. And while Gina hungers for the same power to make music videos "alive" again through the use of this technology, possibly rekindling everyone's love for rock'n'roll again, as well as Mark's own love for her. Mark allows it to consume him whole.

Through the eyes of many of the characters we see what capitalism has wrought. Only this time it's through this more interesting lens rooted in music; quizzically, not punk. The idea that the first wave was almost gone and along with it, cyberpunk as a subgenre, parallels Gina and Mark's struggle with their past and glory days. How enticing our memories make events that were actually horrible; allowing us to view the wreckage of our lives with rose-coloured glasses. Post-cyberpunk in that it seems to critically evaluate the genre, subverting it in a few places.

"This ain't rock'n'roll. It ain't been rock'n'roll for a long fucking time. This is business, and money, and change for the machines, but it ain't rock'n'roll.

Mark himself could represent the genre as it existed in first wave. He is an anti-hero, unlikeable but attractive in non-conformative ways. His past has destroyed parts of him, including some brain damage that makes him even better at using tech to become more than he is now, transcending himself. Leaving "the meat," as he so often refers to it, behind. He has a particular affinity and knack for something because society has fucked him up; the "system" has damaged him. The typical protagonist for early cyberpunk.

"I'm not really in there, now. I'm maintaining it, but there's nobody home. I know it doesn't happen that way for you, but that's how it is for me. "

Gina can interact with people just fine, though. She is more-or-less "well adjusted" and chooses to be a voice of dissent. Picking physical conflicts and verbal ones, choosing embodiment every step of the way. How she interacts with people, especially if they are seen by her as being a part of the system that has essentially destroyed the love of her life, Visual Mark, is by being angry. Being a punk. She is a part of an older generation, now been left behind. She's angry, and tired, and does exactly what she wants when she wants to. The only weakness she has is Mark, the personification of this old way of life that she cannot let go. The wound in her mouth that would heal; if she'd only stop tonguing it.

The book is primarily (as I see it) about examining embodiment; the products of our society and commodification of anything of value. Who power structures benefit and what those wounds might look like in a cyberpunk future becoming an allegory for the targeting of the unlucky few, who grow to be far too many. How powerful nostalgia is, a resurgence of it being inevitable, often; usually by means of any advancement in technologies. It's smart, funny, at times; easy to empathize with, and features good prose mixed with a cyberpunk aesthetic that feels like a prequel while being critical of the genre as it was about to "die."

It's worth reading.

"But it's different when you think you have no choice, and then suddenly you do after all."

Square Eyes features an interesting plot revolving around a woman named Fin who wakes up unsure of who she is after being unplugged from the network. She finds a woman seemingly living her life and slowly unravels a larger mystery about a program she was developing with enormous implications for basically everybody. That in itself would be enough to give it a read, in my opinion.

What is makes this graphic novel more compelling is the presentation. I have never seen futuristic, augmented reality better realized than in Square Eyes. The interface unfolds in intuitive ways, growing more complex as the story goes on and Fin begins to recall more and more of her past. It’s beautiful from a user interface standpoint but presenting the UI in tandem with the story makes for an intelligent and compelling experience; as a UI should be!

Additionally, every page; every spread feels carefully orchestrated to communicate details about the world. They are chock-full of them. It’s easy to get lost in pages roaming around spreads looking at details. This exploration is made even more satisfying due to the physical product itself, which is printed on nice, thick stock that lends even more substance to each page.

It’s a visual and physical feast that sets it apart. Other reviews, I have noticed, downplayed the plot; perhaps because the presentation is so incredible, the plot naturally takes a back seat for some. But I feel like what Square Eyes has to say about the world is prescient, especially regarding information being the number one commodity. Subtly reinforced throughout the reading experience, it can sometimes feel like the plot is shallow because it’s communicated all the time, presenting itself eerily within the world at all times.

With hindsight, we now have regarding Cambridge Analytica’s role in various elections, and multiple other campaigns, the parts of the story where Fin feels disconnected from the world around her due to her being unplugged from the network seems like it might only days away for everyone. Our online experience is a curated bubble. But when everyone is in that bubble and you’re out of it, even when you’re attempting to interact with everyone physically, it’s a different kind of disconnect. Within this fiction, everyone is negotiating their own world in a more literal way due to the network. Their overlays are a far more curated experience that omits people even when they are right there with you.

Notions around forms of online piracy and the ways they might intersect with social class throughout, illustrated further by the interface that blooms from Fin’s own hands, make for an accessible and empathetic approach to communicate technological anxieties that feel new and fresh. Anyone can understand this because of the physicality of everything to do with the product. It’s as real as your hands pressing the next, thick page aside to make room for the next, and that’s a unique, cyberpunk story only available through Square Eyes.

“In print news your job is to know things about others, you peer out at the world through an arrow slit. In telepresence you are known. If I'd still been writing for a newspaper—if there still were newspapers—I could have forgotten...”

In 1996 Raphael Carter wrote The Fortunate Fall. For perspective, Neuromancer came out only 12 years previous and this book is already placed squarely in post-cyberpunk. Normally I'd scoff a little at that..but I have to say that is more of an acknowledgment of this work than the post-modern call to kill the genre from the onset of its birth (by the very people who wrote in the field no less). For reference, Trouble and her Friends came out only 2 years previous and I would not call that post-cyberpunk. It's also very hard to review because of the structure and how the book ends.

Maya tells her story as though the reader is an audience consuming a story by her with prior knowledge of an important historical event, or at least an extremely newsworthy one; to the point that it seems assumed the general populace or consumer of this knows of it, at least. And they are getting the "real" truth by reading it rather than getting it in another, futuristic format like moistdisk, opticube, dryROM, where the whole truth was not disclosed to the consumer.

“...you can't just break through a person's defenses like that; the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.”

In the 24th-century Maya is what is called a "telepresence." She is cyberized to not only report the news but to almost become the news. All of her is broadcasted; her thoughts, memories, feelings—all of it goes out and is consumed by the audience. Because of this massive sensory output, all telepresence have a screener; post-production happens on the fly as it goes out over the net. Only the memories and thoughts that play well with the story actually ever make it to the audience. The screener, however, consumes all of it.

When Maya's screener falls in love with her after imbibing essentially everything (emotions, both past and present memories, etc.) about her while broadcasting a story to the world, things start to really get interesting.

“You think we have a connection because of all the things you've sucked out of my mind by screening, but that isn't real. Trust comes when you've worked with someone for years; it doesn't speed up just because you can think fast, and it doesn't materialize when you stick a cable in someone's head. What you get from screening me isn't friendship, it's data. We're strangers.”

Through her perspective we learn of the world, we learn she's a criminal and has a suppressor chip in her head that stops her from feeling any strong emotions for other people, and that she's got a criminal record for this. Ostensibly, she doesn't feel the same as everyone else around her but always seems more human (or humanized by the narrative); often reading as very endearing to me because she's got this disconnect with herself and others that are all too relatable in this day and age. Also of note, cognitive dissonance is exceptionally well executed throughout this fiction.

Maya's recounting is largely of her big break, the scoop of a lifetime, the last whale to ever exist, if it's real; and whether it's true or not, because of the nature of how the narrative is structured, makes a compelling read that ends up being largely subjective to the reader.

Dissidents like Maya, as we learn, are literally suppressed with chips and the state is cold, fascist, and mechanical; evocative of late 80's fearfulness of technology but also clearly evocative of Nazi Germany and fascism, in general.

This future has the cyberpunk action you'd expect sure, but the technical aspects are really well done compared to most first wave cyberpunk; Raphael seems to have had a better understanding of technology, took the first wave template, and used it to great effect here. This world is very rich. Personality and technology aside, the plausibility of it is scary because of the bigotry so rampant these days. This nihilistic future the genre often depicts also has, this time, a laser focus. An unabashed, condemnation brought with an intensity and precision I've rarely read. The cultural psyche in which the major population has in their minds regarding their view of individual citizens gender identity and proclivity toward tribalism is still reflective of where we are today.

“The mind has doors...even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.”

The prose are beautiful from the very first page to the end of the book. There are multiple themes reminiscent of 1st wave that is done so much better. Technology keeping us further apart yet connecting us, what that would do to our relationships is eerily on point for a book that predates my own ability to get Internet access.

It's a short read, it's compelling and relevant. It's also worth noting this was the first and only debut of the author who refused to be associated with any gender at the time of writing. Part of what makes Maya's story so riveting is, perhaps, this earnest expression of self in the text. There is no clear villain in the story. Maya herself is never untarnished and sometimes exemplifies the biases that a population internalizes, made even more complicated because of by her own omission, she is the one recanting her story, without the benefits of future technology where people may know the truth of things because they would also have the context of her emotions, feeling them as they consumed the story.

“...it changes the central fact of the human condition: that each of us lives behind one set of eyes, and not another; that our own pain is an agony, and another's pain only an abstraction we believe in by an act of faith. It makes impossible all the sins of locality, all the errors that arise from being prisoned in one body and no other--as racism, sexism, classism, and of course and especially nationalism.”

The intersectional characters explore and bring out different aspects of Maya and the technology too, is a vehicle for her exploration, limiting her and governing her. Effecting her years later from its inception. Her own will is literally stifled when she is a camera and therefore the lens from which people perceive the entirety of the story though, so much so that at one point, the audience will not even allow her to blink because they are captivated by what she sees.

“I'd caught what cameras call an updraft: just as the viewers got over the first rush of interest, others smelled the excitement and tuned in. The surprise of the newcomers strengthened the scent, attracting still more people, in a spiral that could make the feedback escalate out of control. Wave upon wave of astonishment crashed through me. I tried to look down, but the curiosity of millions forced my head back up. I stood there staring at the whale like someone forced to look into the sun, unable to turn away, though my mind cringed from the sight and my eyes were burning. It was not just an updraft, but riptide: feedback so strong that it flooded out my own emotions and derailed my thoughts. The audience grew so large and so greedy that it wouldn't even let me blink.”

The actual historical truth and alteration of media coverage and news is on trial via the actual job of being a telepresence and what it entails and is demanded by the population. Hint: it's not to be a well-educated population so that they can make proper decisions voting anymore (nor is it now, any longer). Its fascinating and the relationship to our media is very well articulated in a very nuanced and deft commentary on a lot of broad sociological issues.

This book came across to me as very thoughtful, often insightful; always beautiful, filled with prose. The Summer Prince was a similar read for me, I know I will reread this quite a few times. Check out some of the lifts from the book I took to see if it's your style, for me it was well beyond what I was hoping for.

“Feel no regret for roses, autumn too has its delights...How could she say that? Didn't she see that for us there could never be autumn, that we could never sit, as anyone else could sit, beside the fire all day on Sundays in November; that September's leaves, that fall for man and beast alike, were not our leaves to walk in; that October storms would never find us sharing an umbrella? The love of spring had thrived on wine and candles; now in the August of our lives, we needed newspapers and comfortable chairs. But it was impossible. No autumn--only a cold wind that blew through our summer, freezing the leaves in their places before they could motley and fall.”