Black Gate

I’m not quite clear why we decided that -punk was a postfix meaning “technology.” It started with cyberpunk, I think, only there punk had its original meaning, namely a social movement with unconventional and defiant attitudes and styles. And then steampunk happened. But the term steampunk derived from cyberpunk rather than its root words, and the focus was on the technology rather than the attitude. Soon steampunk was so broad as to encompass any form of science fiction that took place in 19th century society, or at least a recapitulation of what 19th century science fiction writers thought the future would be, without the benefit of the changes that the early 20th century brought. But soon we were adding punk to the end of pretty much anything, to describe a society based on that technology: magicpunk, for example, or even fishpunk.

This month’s book, The Greatest Light by Scott Robinson, calls itself crystal-punk. As you might guess, it takes place in a world based on crystal technology, where crystal arrays provide the technological underpinning. How does that make it different than ours, you ask? In many ways it doesn’t. Robinson’s world has cars and airplanes, lasers and LCDs (liquid crystal displays), and even computers. But it doesn’t have electricity or radios, and it’s pistols are still of the single shot variety. However, it does have flying islands—skylands—where the whole society lives, having abandoned the ground as uninhabitable years ago. Ultimately, the fact that they use crystals is less important than the fact that the technology is different. This also means that it’s not clear whether this book fits in the science fiction or fantasy category, but I decided not to worry too much about that a while ago.

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When I was growing up, Athena was my favourite goddess. What’s not to like? She springs fully-armed from the head of Zeus. She’s the goddess of Wisdom, as well as the goddess of War – oh, and the Liberal Arts. Except for that silly apple of discord episode, she’s the perfect role model for a young girl.

The thing is, when I was growing up, and there were only male heroes in the type of story I liked to read, it didn’t really bother me. When you have nothing else to compare it to, the world you have seems normal. For some reason, I didn’t feel excluded, nor did I feel that women couldn’t be the hero. I just thought no one had written those stories yet. See, all the writers seemed to be men, so I guess I figured that explained it. Certainly all the stories I made up to tell my friends had female leads. Swashbuckling, sword-wielding female leads.

Nowadays we tend toward using words like “protagonist” and “main character” rather than “hero,” and I think that’s to avoid the connotations that come along with the word. For some reason, when people say “hero,” they think it means some flawless gem of humanity. Well, maybe there were some of those, somewhere along the way, but if so, I never read about them. Every hero I’ve personally encountered, from Oedipus to Iron Man, is flawed – some even have a “tragic flaw” that results in their undoing.

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