Comment by A_D_E_P_T
Is that your article? I'm afraid I think that it badly misses the mark. Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot. That's the common thread; writing style, setting characteristics, etc., are diverse.
Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!"
Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection:
-The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.)
-The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things.
-The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly.
Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that.
What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
I think you might be missing the mark. The "cyberpunks", the original authors who started the genre, raised eyebrows because in their stories technology wasn't described as something that invariably had a positive impact on people's lives, quite the contrary. That is was what set them apart from the techno optimistic utopianism that dominated science fiction at the time. The authors were called punks because they were going against the grain and, like punk, did a sort of reset of science fiction.
Their works were also big on the impact of globalisation (corporations become more important than counties) and the cultural impact of technology.
The caper plots are just a coincidence.
If you write a crime novel with technology set in the near future, you might just end up with the kind of science fiction that the cyberpunks were trying to get away from.