BOOK REVIEW : ‘He, She and It’: a Bold Look Into Future : HE, SHE AND IT <i> by Marge Piercy</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf; $22; 445 pages

Marge Piercy is one of our boldest and most prolific writers. Now, in “He, She and It,” her eleventh novel, she has concocted a literary version of future shock; with her customary panache, she ranges from philosophical discussion to cartoonish scenes of mental warfare.

This is not the first time Piercy has turned her eyes to the future. Her earlier novel of science fiction, “Woman on the Edge of Time,” has become something of a classic in the literature of feminist utopias, a genre pioneered by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “Herland.” Like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “He, She and It” finds disturbing trends in contemporary culture and projects a disastrous future, a dystopia.

“He, She and It” concerns a town called Tikva--Hebrew for hope-- founded by the Jews after a long period of persecution. Tikva exists in a kind of dome over what used to be the Northeastern United States.

The year is 2061, and nuclear war has already resulted in worldwide economic and environmental catastrophe, and the ozone layer is so depleted that human life can survive only under gigantic protective wraps. Vast corporations have taken over nearly every aspect of human life; one of them, Y-S, wanting Tikva in its power, threatens to attack.

The novel begins when its heroine, Shira Shipman, hears that her former husband has been awarded custody of their 2-year-old son, Ari. Shira flees to her grandmother’s house in Tikva to plan a strategy for winning back her son. In the meantime she accepts a job with a scientist involved in the illegal creation of a cyborg, or robot. This cyborg, called Yod, is meant to help with Tikva’s defense. Shira’s task is to help it refine its social skills, so that it can pass as a human.

To her astonishment, Shira falls into a romantic relationship with Yod, who becomes Shira’s ally in her fight to win back her son. He also defends Tikva courageously, although his joy in the battle frightens everyone.

Yod seems a sturdy and compassionate soul, and his situation can seem quite poignant. At one point, after he and Shira hear a story about the past, he comments, “You are embedded in history in a sense that I can’t be. What leads to me? Legends, theories, comic books.”

Questions about Yod’s free will and his own feelings give urgency to a classic question: What qualities make us human?

Interspersed with Shira’s story are tales of Jewish ghetto life in Prague in the year 1600. Her grandmother, Malkah, tells these stories to Yod as part of his programming; she gives him his history as she sees it: his “ancestor” in the figure of Joseph the Shamash.

Joseph is a golem of Hebrew legend, a creature formed from the Earth by the Rabbi Judah Loew and created to defend the ghetto against Christian attacks. Malkah turns to this history as a way to wrestle with the morality of her own role in the creation of Yod, a futuristic golem.

Willa Cather once said that if you described for her a writer’s limitations, she would outline that writer’s area of strength. It seems especially true of Piercy that her gifts and shortcomings are intimately related. She has a vast imaginative reach, and her art wants to accommodate all phases of life. The urgency that fuels this ambition can give her work a crude, unfinished quality.

In “He, She and It,” the prose varies from clunky and wooden to elegant and finely tuned. The scenes can appear sketchy and canned or richly textured and deeply absorbing. Yet Piercy’s artistic intelligence presides; her complex, questioning mind propels readers and involves them in her pursuits.

“He, She and It” prompts us to make unusual connections and to wonder about what cannot be known or said. It’s a novel that exudes a sense of enormous space--physical and mental, and to read it is to be caught up in the sweep of Piercy’s mind, the range of her heart, the exuberance and severity of her vision.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Tales of the Master Race” by Marcie Hershman (HarperCollins).