I can’t recall the moment I was first introduced to cyberpunk, though I know it had to happen at some discreet point in my personal history, because when I first started reading science fiction cyberpunk had not yet been born. If I had to guess, though, I think it was reading William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" in my friend Tom's copy of Omni magazine in eighth grade study hall.

It may be hard for you to imagine a world in which there is no Internet and no cellphone, but I can still remember my father bringing home a portable calculator for the first time in 1974: it had an 8-digit, green LED readout; no memory; and could only add, subtract, multiply and divide.

It cost $79 dollars. At the time, it seemed magical, and math teachers complained that students would stop learning math if such devices became commonplace.

I saw my first VCR in 1975, when it was used primarily to record broadcast television shows for later viewing.

We did not have a VHS recorder in our home until 1978. A feature length pre-recorded film on VHS cost around $100 to purchase and only one store within 50 miles sold them.

1978 was also the first year I saw a personal computer. It was a TRS-80 Model 1 that my brother’s roommate bought.

It had 4kb of ROM, 4kb of RAM and a tape recorder to store programs. It cost $600.

I did not see a personal computer in a school until 1981, and then only a small number of gifted students were allowed access to it.

This meant that most all our assignments and papers were hand written, and when we were assigned a research paper that had to be typed, it had to be written out and revised by hand before being typed in its entirety once it was complete. Add a sentence or paragraph to a page and every page that followed needed to be re-typed as well.

And when it came to doing actual research, we were limited to what books and periodicals we could access in the local libraries. Every community had its own small collection of texts, and wider access required physical travel to another place and access to another library. The researcher’s knowledge of other texts was entirely limited to the catalogs and bibliographies to which he or she had physical access.

But, starting in 1978,  if you had a personal computer and a smartmodem you might be able to connect your computer to a telephone and access a BBS.

If you could do this, though, slow data transfer rates limited you to small text files, which was okay, because 5.25″ floppy disks could only store 360kb of data per disk — 180kb per side.

The first commercial cell phone hit the market in 1984.

It cost $3,300, weighed nearly two pounds, was 10″ long and had a battery life of 30 minutes.

This is the world into which Cyberpunk was born -- a world in which the Internet was a fantasy and the idea of gigabytes of RAM belonged only to government super computers.

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Feminist Heroes of 70s and 80s SF

There she is. Oh Princess, my princess. I was ten years old the summer my brother took me to see a Saturday matinee of Star Wars and kicked off my first fandom. "She's beautiful," Luke says as he looks at the holographic message R2-D2 teases him with, but it wasn't her beauty that made her revolutionary so much as it was that she was tough, brash, and could handle a blaster. I had no idea at ten that Leia was such an anomaly, but thirty years later I look at so many other princesses and strong female characters (how I hate the patronizing sound of that description) and realize how few of them live up to the legacy of Princess Leia - the original Self-Rescuing Princess.

(Yes, I know...Luke, Han and Chewbacca busted her out of her cell, but they would have all wound up dead were it not for Leia blowing that hole in the wall and jumping into the trash chute. She showed initiative.)

Ellen Ripley starts off in Alien as a "final girl" character. She's tough and competent and a survivor. By the time Aliens rolls around, however, she's taken on a more complex character that alloys the steel of the original with layers of trauma before tempering her by adding the character of Newt to the mix, giving her a maternal side that we only glimpsed in the first film through her interaction with the crew's cat, Jones. This fiercely protective strength is played explicitly against the macho bravado of the Colonial Marines who accompany her on the trip.

And then there's Sarah Connor, who goes from being the waitress in need of rescuing in The Terminator to the physically imposing paranoid fanatic capable of raising her son to be the leader of the human resistance in Terminator 2. Sarah Connor shares a lot of characteristics with Ellen Ripley, but she has a much harder edge and a ruthless streak that is absent from Ripley.

There had been plenty of ass-kicking women before these three, but Leia, Ripley, and Sarah were the three prototypes for female heroes that were complex, competent, flawed and ferocious...and utterly believable.