He, She and It

Lore & Background

The story takes place in North America in the year 2059. Economic and political power is held by a few multis—huge multinational enterprises—while most people live in the glop, a polluted, violent megalopolis. Free towns like Tikva remain autonomous by selling technologies. The protagonist, Shira, returns to Tikva after losing custody of her son and works on socializing Yod, a cyborg created illegally to protect the city. Shira and Yod develop a sexual relationship, and the plot involves custody battles, corporate attacks, and infiltration of the Y-S network.

Reader's Guide

The novel interweaves a parallel story told by Malkah, Shira's grandmother, about Rabbi Judah Loew creating a golem in 17th century Prague to protect the Jewish ghetto. Both narratives explore what it means to be human from the perspective of man-made life and those who love such beings. He, She, and It examines themes also present in Piercy's earlier novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), including gender roles, political economy, and environmentalism. The novel's significance lies in its fusion of cyberpunk tropes with Jewish mysticism and its questioning of identity, autonomy, and the ethics of creating artificial life.

Did You Know?

• The novel was retitled Body of Glass in the United Kingdom.
• The cyborg Yod is the tenth in a series of failed experiments.
• The novel interweaves a secondary narrative about the creation of a golem in 17th century Prague.

Genre-Defining Influence

Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend is frequently cited as a watershed moment for horror and speculative fiction. The book is credited with catalyzing the modern development of both zombie and vampire literature as recognized genres, and it introduced the now-common narrative device of grounding supernatural creatures in a scientific, rational explanation. It also helped establish the worldwide-disease-apocalypse as a popular story framework. The novel's reach extended well beyond its own adaptations: George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead was directly inspired by Matheson's work, linking the book to the birth of the modern zombie movie. Over five decades, the story was brought to the screen three separate times, each adaptation reinterpreting Neville's lonely struggle for a new generation of audiences.

The Scientific Deconstruction of the Supernatural

One of the novel's most distinctive contributions is its insistence on explaining the vampire through biology rather than mysticism. Neville, driven by his isolation and a desperate need for answers, conducts painstaking research at the Los Angeles Public Library and with microscopes, eventually identifying the root cause as a bacillus strain of bacteria capable of infecting both living and deceased hosts. He discovers the organisms are anaerobic symbionts that, when exposed to oxygen through sunlight or wide wounds, flip into aerobic parasites that rapidly consume their hosts, producing the instant liquefaction that makes the creatures appear to dissolve. The bacteria also secrete a resilient adhesive that seals narrow or blunt wounds, accounting for the creatures' apparent bulletproofing. Perhaps most strikingly, Neville theorizes that the vampires' well-known aversions to mirrors and crosses are not supernatural at all but a form of hysterical blindness triggered by pre-plague media sensationalism, causing the infected to delusionally perform the behaviors they associate with folklore.

Neville's Psychological Descent and the Role Reversal

At its core, I Am Legend is a study of a man slowly consumed by solitude. Neville endures three years of extreme isolation, depression, and alcoholism in a Los Angeles emptied by a pandemic. His grief over the loss of his wife and daughter surfaces in painful flashbacks, and his bond with a sickly stray dog, which dies after just a week, deepens his emotional devastation while simultaneously sharpening his resolve to understand what has happened. The novel's most powerful turn arrives in its final act, when Neville encounters Ruth, a living-infected woman sent to spy on him. After witnessing the new society of infected gleefully annihilate the undead and then break down his door, Neville is captured, shot, and sentenced to execution. Ruth, who genuinely loves him, offers him suicide pills instead. As he takes them, Neville reflects on the complete inversion of roles: he spent years hunting monsters, and now they regard him with the same hatred and fear. His final acknowledgment, that he is a legend, frames him as an urban myth to the new race that has replaced humanity.

Critical Reception and Adaptation History

Despite its enormous cultural footprint, I Am Legend did not arrive to universal acclaim. Initial reviews were mixed, and the critic Damon Knight, writing in In Search of Wonder in 1956, offered a pointed assessment: he acknowledged the book was full of good ideas but felt most of them were abandoned almost immediately, and he described the characters as child's drawings, as blank-eyed and expressionless as the author himself. Such early criticism stands in sharp contrast to the novel's later status as a genre cornerstone. On screen, the story found three distinct interpretations: The Last Man on Earth in 1964, The Omega Man in 1971, and the 2007 film I Am Legend. Each adaptation reimagined Neville's world and the nature of the threat, yet all drew on Matheson's foundational premise of a single survivor grappling with a transformed humanity. The novel also seeded Romero's Night of the Living Dead, ensuring its influence permeated an entire branch of cinema.