Characters…

Here we have another important aspect, the fact that the protagonist in Cyberpunk is always non-conformist with the reality that surrounds him, he may fall into the claws of it's allure, but in moments of lucidity he will relinquish the advantages of such and easy driven life in pursuit of a true existence that can give him an ounce of human essence back. So we have tormented characters that fight their way back into their own interiority, rejecting the easy way, which would probably be accepting the external reality as unchangeable. Here we could even talk about the way physical enhancement in many cyberpunk novels is used to symbolise the loss of individuality of the characters and their inescapable process towards "mechanisation" and the loss of their identity. Even considering a mechanical-physical aid that is conceived to help the individual, a burden to his own freedom.

Characters in Cyberpunk novels also follow very often a dehumanizing process. They transform themselves into what they hate most (though sometimes they don't realize they hate it, they just feel that something isn't right). If you would like to read a very interesting article about characters in Cyberpunk you can click here

http://aetherealforge.com/~aeon/thesis/thesis7.shtml

, and you will be taken to an article that talks about the way the characters in Cyberpunk are usually anti-heroes. The abuse of drugs, the necessity of entering different spaces only achievable through an electronic device, the incapacity of doing things, out of lack of practice, because mechanical devices have taken over… are ingredients of the recipe that technology needs to gain power over humans. Though this implies the existence of AI, this is a very used and known topic of Cyberpunk, that we will talk about later.

Dark themes are usually the perfect ally if what we want to cause in the reader is desperation. The bleak future that awaits human existence if we don't stop giving unlimited power to machines, is the perfect excuse to make Cyberpunk a representation of one of the biggest worries of the 21st Century…