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Originally Posted by tshiggins
The term, "cyberpunk" is supposed to reflect that anarchist, anti-establishment alienation from -- and rebellion against -- a social, political and economic order perceived as fundamentally dehumanizing.
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Vinge's "True Names" had the brain/computer linking and the netrunning and the metaphorical equation of computer software with magic, all of which were tropes of cyberpunk. But its Great Enemy was the Internal Revenue Service and, more broadly, the government, reflecting Vinge's libertarian politics. That may be part of why the genre crystallized around
Neuromancer instead.
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I mean, Bill Stoddard eventually came up with a compelling campaign premise in Whispers, but IIRC, it took even him a while to figure it, and he's as compulsive a campaign-builder as anybody.
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In fact, I thought about it for most of a complete two-year campaign cycle. I like settings that are rich enough to support more than one theme for a campaign (and more than one central conflict), but what theme was suited to make good use of THS wasn't intuitively obvious.