"He She and It", by Marge Piercy. Graphics Arts Center Pub. Co., c1997

In the future world of the 21st century, global warming has reduced Earth to mostly deserts and the cities on the east coast of the United States are underwater. Ozone depletion has caused solar radiation to be a life-threatening hazard for unprotected individuals who leave their domes to venture into the "Raw." Information and "The Net" are commodities valued by individuals and multinational corporations to the extent that information pirates are infiltrating and killing programmers. Against this background, two parallel stories are told.

Avram has spent his life creating robots. Although there are rules against creating humanoid cyborgs, he has broken them to create Yod, who's job will be to defend the independent city of Tikva against the information pirates. Shira and her grandmother Malkah, who are artificial intelligence experts, have been working - also illegally - to program Yod to be as humanlike as possible, and to socialize him so he fits in with other humans. As part of this socialization, Malkah recounts to him the story of a golem, created in similarly dangerous times during the 1600s in Prague.

This book was recommended to me by a librarian classmate as a prescient example of how the boundaries between the real world and virtual worlds have become blurred, as more and more people join social networking communities and virtual worlds like Second Life.