I'll argue the point with this one. In cyberpunk, technology becomes universal and omnipresent. Nature is very rarely a major factor in any cyberpunk work, the landscapes and settings all being a part of humankind's infrastructure. This complete enclosure and reliance on tech is part of the alienation that the characters in the books experience with their surroundings, just as the conscious acceptance and adaptation to specific environments is a characteristic of the same characters. Case and the Matrix, for example.

In Cyberpunk, knowledge can literally become power. America is, right now, Post-Industrialist in places. But you could never ascend to cybernetic godhead or encode your mind into a computer. The process of becoming (or contacting) something greater or other than human requires tech to work; the Hacker is the symbol of the modern magician or priest. They have an understanding, or at least a desire, to enter another, immaterial world.

Eh. I've never seen a cyberpunk antihero (strictly speaking, an antihero is not someone that we would normally see as villainous as the star of the story--that is, an Antihero is Hector of Troy, not Robin Hood.) I'd hesitate to imply "the System" and "righteous cause" to any cyberpunk (accept 'The Matrix'). The characters are necessairilly on the edge of things, but the world is so broken into smaller vistas and communities that this is almost entirely relative. Applying the term righteous to any Cyberpunk philosophy is rather hypocritical; most of Cyberpunk moralities consist of a series of grays shaded to black for the truly amoral bastards.

An important element in Cyberpunk is the accretion of disparate elements--things that you might not associate together but which "click" and accomplish things.

Nice to see you're taking an interest in this as dispassionately as possible.

I'm curious where you get that from exactly; Neuromancer certainly is exactly the opposite. Case is struggling for two monstrously powerful AIs (or being used by one, at the very least), and isn't really trying to do any more than get his life back (which is completely in shambles at the beginning of the story).

The classic cyberpunk motif seems to be people living outside of normal society for one reason or another, trying to make their way and being caught up in the machinations of things they don't fully understand (or at least, not until the end of the story). Technology is pervasive, everyone has to deal with it, in one way or another, but it's not always about the technology, per se. It's about the people, and how they deal with it, what they do with it, and where it goes by itself. Cyberpunk has a lot in common with the noir genre, probably more than other science fiction actually. Morality and ethics are muddled -- most characters are just doing what they have to in order to get by, but I don't know any cyberpunk protagonist who has ever really struck me as "evil" or psychopathic. They are usually at least sympathetic -- unlike some RPG campaigns I've played in, very few cyberpunk protagonists are human killing machines that give no thought to killing someone in cold blood (which isn't to say they don't do it, just that they at least realize what it is they are doing and consider it a necessity).

Cyberpunk is a genre, and stories within it can explore a zillion different themes within that genre, but there isn't just one or two themes that are "cyberpunk". Sure, you can have a cyberpunk universe where corporations are all that matters and nationality is meaningless. But you can have cyberpunk where nations are still important, and the protagonist is dealing with an oppressive police state (I'd certainly qualify Minority Report, the short story and the movie, as cyberpunk). You can have cyberpunk where the question is what it means to be human -- but you can have cyberpunk where that isn't a theme (I'll cite Minority Report again, but there's plenty of other examples too). Both of these are certainly valid themes, but just because they aren't there doesn't mean it's not cyberpunk.

Any room in this thread for making fun of people who don't understand the difference between "lose" and "loose"?

Hence the smiley. In other words I was just kidding.

Sure. Just to be clear I do understand the difference but spelling isn't' my bag baby.
Thank God for spell check. Too bad it doesn't understand context yet.

Thanos

[EDIT] I guess I should have used the winky instead of the smiley

The anti-hero is, very much, a core part of cyberpunk, for many reasons. The anti-hero is simply a character which lacks those qualities which are normally associated with a hero. He might be a criminal. He might be cowardly. He might be incompotent. He's a protagonist, but not a hero (non-CP anaolgy, Vic Mackey from The Shield).

One of the major themes I see in cyberpunk literature is the dehumanizaiton of people in general, whether through crushing poverty, a simple lack of morality, or cyberware and the like. The protagonist often has to bargain away a part of himself in order to gain power, whether Johnny Mnemonic and his loss of childhood memories, Sarah's implanted cybernetic killing machine that almost suffocates her when she uses it, or Marid Audran and his beserker moddie.

Sometimes there's also a theme of revolution to counteract the oppression (all three of the stories I list above have it), but sometimes not. Some interesting bits from a FAQ floating around out there. Their take is that cyberpunk can be broken down into the "cyber" and the "punk".

Since most cyberpunk includes a societal oppressive force which makes people into a part of it (often with their own bodies, collectively becoming the "machine") this accounts for the "cyber" aspect. Since the genre seems to focus on the edgerunners and fringers of society, it has a "punk" aspect. Anyway, that site spells that part out better

Just to supplement Siege's link. Wikipedia's Anti-Hero deffinition

Interesting topic. Thanks Thanos.