Neuromancer is my favorite book. Not one of, but the one.
After watching the trailer I must say that the overall vibe is substantially off. Very pretty, but it lacks the perpetually disoriented, if you will, atmosphere that dominates the narration in the book. It's all too clean and predictable in the trailer.
But it is a difficult book to adapt, I will give them that.
Neuromancer is my favorite book. Not one of, but the one.
Same.
After watching the trailer I must say that the overall vibe is substantially off.
Possibly. I'm not sure the trailer give us enough to really conclude that. But here's the thing... at least for me: it doesn't matter. I mean, I don't expect an adaptation of Neuromancer to be an exact match for my mental image of Neuromancer. It is, after all, an adaptation. It's going to be different. And - up to some ill-defined point - that's OK.
I just remind myself that if I want Neuromancer the way I see it in my head, I can always just read the novel again. But watching this show, I'll be trying to remind myself that it is its own work and that I shouldn't judge it by what's in my head. Hopefully I can just sit back and enjoy it and not spend too much time thinking "Oooh, that's not what the Chat is supposed to look like" or "He doesn't look like Ratz", etc.
Is there a line "too far" where it might be so different that it makes it hard to impossible for me to enjoy? I suppose. But at the very least I'm not going to make any assumptions off a 1:10 long trailer.
But it is a difficult book to adapt,
Indeed. I'm no screenwriter, so maybe this doesn't mean much, but I can't even really begin to imagine how you would adapt this and really capture all of what makes it so unique. I'm just hoping they did a reasonably credible job.
I think it's literally impossible to adapt it as written and have it appeal to a mass audience. I've been pimping the book to anyone who'd listen and most people give up after few pages. It apparently requires an effort to read... which it does.
The best books usually are quite difficult to adapt. It's a lot easier to give characters internality because you can just say what they're thinking in a book quickly in a way that's jarring in a show or movie. I can't remember the last time I heard an internal dialog on a show.
I watched the trailer, and it doesn't mesh with anything I remember from the book. As the GP says, the book is disorienting. Not because of internal monologue, but because of the language. It places new words in essential places, where you can't really parse the sentence, and have to form some sort of impression. The rest of the imagery has been done to death. Some bits from the trailer looked a lot like Blade Runner. But the neologisms, feeling out of depth, that's an essential part of the book, never done in movies AFAIK, and I don't see it in the trailer.
I'm reading The Peripheral (2014) by William Gibson, and it does exactly this. The lingo starts on page one, and then it's meaning is slowly revealed throughout the book. I don't know if this pattern has a name, but it's very pronounced.
There's a few different terms that get used for it. Argot is the name for that kind of secret or subgroup specific vocabulary. Then deep end world building is a more general term for just dumping the reader into the world with limited to no preamble to familiarize them with the world.
Neal Stephensons Anathem did that do me, took me quite a lot of pages to get behind some of the words. Loved that. Can you recommend other authors who do that?
Not sure if that's because it's not going to be there or if it's just the parts the trailer covers don't have Gibson's brand of techno-babble in it or if they were selected to not have it to not confuse people in the teaser.
Dexter had the best internal dialog I can remember; it's like the protagonist had two greatly contrasting personalities (his outward demeanor and then his internal dialog) which were constantly riffing off each other on screen, though it never got in the way. Just pitch perfect throughout.
For a show where the internal dialog eventually does become a bit annoying, look at You (in my mind, greatly inspired by Dexter).
Dexter might have been the last one I watched that featured it heavily for sure. At least among live action I guess I should caveat, anime still uses it quite a bit as a shortcut.
Trailer doesn't match the way I pictured it when I read it as a kid (which wasn't that long after it was published).
That's fine, that's usually the case, few adaptations get close to what you build in your head (The Expanse did, it pretty much nailed that which is I suspect why I liked it so much) but yeah, the world looks too clean.
Looks bad. It does not look nowhere near as dark and dystopic. Looks like a comic con in NYC. Altered Carbon S1 nailed it, also Ghost in the Shell (the live action film with Scarlett Johanson)... that's like peak cyberpunk aesthetic in recent years, this looks like too pretty on purpose. Cast looks weak as well.
William Gibson himself worked on it so my hopes are high. All great books are difficult to adapt and none of them will ever match what we imagined ourselves while reading them.
In the late 90’s it looked like we were going to get a Neuromancer film by the amazing director Chris Cunningham, known for his Aphex Twin and Bjork videos. Gibson strongly approved of Cunningham, reportedly stating he was the only person he had met whom he trusted to do the adaptation justice. Sadly, it never came to be.
Chris Cunningham spoke later about how he had to leave Hollywood due to a desire for complete creative control and frustration with the studio system. He was never going to make this movie. I think Gibson liked bold auteur types but they tend to also be the types who won't be told what to do. We saw the same conflict with Lynch's Dune, essentially something that could have been a masterpiece just mired in studio politics and executive control and executive final cuts.
When I first read Neuromancer I wanted it to be adapted into a film. I think the reason was a common one: when you love a book you want there to be some validation of your affection from the rest of the world. A bunch of people deciding to make a movie feels like validation, especially if it goes on to be wildly successful.
Over the years and many successive readings my feelings have changed. In some ways, a screen adaptation make less sense with every passing year. As Gibson himself points out, sci-fi works are always a commentary about the time in which they are written, not the future time in which they seem to take place and there's a lot of the 1980's in Neuromancer, from punk-rock counterculture to the Cold Way, from payphones to the technological ascendancy of Japan, and I'm not sure how much it would feel like the novel if all that stuff is taken out or changed. Also, presumably because it's been in production hell for so long it's already been kinda strip-mined by other works. There's a lot of Neuromancer in The Matrix as well as echoes of it in a bunch of lesser films from the 90's (e.g. Lawnmower Man, Hackers, Ghost in the Shell), to say nothing of Cyberpunk 2077.
Lastly, films like Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic have shown us that attempts to cinematically depict cyberspace can end up looking laughably ridiculous. I observe that there is essentially no depiction of it in the series trailer/preview. I wonder if they'll try to side-step its depiction as much as possible.
I'll probably end up watching it, if for no other reason than to see how they approach all of the above but I've largely given up on hoping it will capture the mood and feeling of the novel. It's even possible that it ends up falling into the "very good but very different" category of things like The Haunting of Hill House, Foundation, The Shining etc. I'd settle for that.
In some ways, a screen adaptation make less sense with every passing year.
I normally agree, but with AI agents I find myself thinking about Neuromancer frequently. Somedays I feel like a Netrunner with what my AI and I can do. I am also now getting slightly paranoid of what other people and their AIs can do. I bought a 'deck' (GPU) for the first time in a decade and my office glows with color and once again has the reassuring sound of whirring fans. I've attempted to secure my network like I never have before and have my AI watching over it. It can take some automated actions but not enough for it to automatically defend...yet. Maybe I feel more like a shitty Netrunner at this point :)
Even posts about hacking into your own air purifier[1] make me feel like we have the power again. Some of that naive? 90's era optimism. Regardless, I hope the show is good!
I've read neuromancer a few times and it's one of those rare books that always holds up. It's a stream of words plugged directly into my imagination and I see that world in my own way, lingering around and filling in the spaces Gibson describes.
It's nice that people are putting a lot of effort into making a movie about it but for me watching would be like taking the tourist bus around a place I already know and love.
I'd feel something similar if they did The Mote In God's Eye, with the difference that I think curiosity would get the better of me there.
I re-read all of the Sprawl Trilogy books (and Johnny
Mnemonic from Burning Chrome) just to be ready for the
upcoming Apple TV series. It's going to be tough to match
the imagination of the books, but the trailers make the
series look great.
As an aside... I originally read Neuromancer, et al. back
in the 80s, before I had read Burroughs or Cassady or
Kerouac. After re-reading the trilogy after reading the
beats (especially Burroughs) I completely understand why
the literary hoi and palloi were going ga-ga over
Neuromancer in the 80s.
Anyway... you still have a couple months to read (or
re-read) Neuromancer. It's a delightful book, even on
second reading.
After re-reading them all, I think MLO might be my favourite.
Maybe it's because Gibson doesn't spend as much time describing
cyber-space. And it seems like when we jump between narrative
threads, it's not as jarring. Or maybe I was just more used to
the writing style. I encourage you to keep going.
I'm hyped for this, hope it makes justice to the book. The cast looks spot on, let's see how they imagined Freeside, Chiba and my favourite: the orbital Rastafarian colony Zion.
I've read Neuromancer and liked it back in 2002, as a teenager. And whenever rumors about an adaptation came up, I was curious.
So in that 42-year journey I was along for 24 years.
I think the adaptation will probably be neither a masterpiece nor a flop. So... kinda anticlimactic: wait for 24 years and get some "middle ground" that will be mostly forgotten in the end.
But still, it's interesting for me to see it. Because Gibson dreamed the cyberpunk, and we kinda live it. AI is one of the main characters in Neuromancer. And AI is what we talk about all day nowadays. Of course, there's a world of difference between his vision and our reality... But the more interesting it is to compare.
I read the book for the first time last year. It was a bit of a drag to read unfortunately. I understand that it's pioneering, but much of it's content has been done a lot in other media, leaving it feeling derivative (even though I know it's the other way around). The John Carter movie gave me similar vibes when I watched it.
Read Naked Lunch by Burroughs, then read Neuromancer. Then read The Ticket That Exploded by Burroughs.
Gibson has mentioned he was greatly influenced by the beats (Burroughs is sometimes called the godfather of the beats) and it very much shows. Somewhere in the 80s people picked up on Orwell's style and encouraged everyone to eschew anything that wasn't short sentences describing physical characteristics.
I don't know if Gibson was trying to make a "difficult to read" text, but his influences were pretty clear about how they cared more about the immediacy of emotional impact than clear prose.
This confused me, because I thought you were referring to Edgar Rice Burroughs. You were referring to William S. Burroughs, whom I have never heard of before.
Lol. Yes. Sorry for the confusion. Now I can't help but think what if William S. Burroughs had written "A Princess of Mars." I believe it would have been a very different book.
(Reads:_) "From competent space hippies, into incompetent space hippies."
Thinks... there was an arcade...not? Is it an 21th century interactive movie, where characters can be flipped via Objects=>"AI"=>Moddeling/for entertainment purpose ?
Thinks again... hippies, well... some think that "AI" makes "Revivals" and "Offspins"...likely, while reaching a bigger crowd... /Think of Realtime-Resync-Language-Modells, trained while People chatting...
(Reads again:_) "Readers create their own visuals in their own imaginations."
The fact that we get a Neuromancer movie made by an Internet streaming service owned by one of the founding companies of the personal computing revolution, which is now the most valuable company in the world, is somehow quite fitting for a cyberpunk story...
I started reading it as a teenager and found it essentially unreadable, and quickly moved on to something else. I wonder if I'd find it any better as an adult...
Gibson has had his fingers in this. I hope that leads them away from making this a complete wash. Even if it flops, maybe it'll get the ball rolling on more media critical of our apparent now and near future prospects (with a little pizazz)
I hope real true fans and talented people that make, produce, and direct it and it's not just a cash grab like so many modern nostalgia works (Star Wars, Rings of Power, etc.).
It was okay, but was a bit disappointing changing the colonists from competent space hippies, into incompetent space hippies. The weird digression from the book at the 2/3 mark of the season seemed purely to try to contort the story back around this unnecessary change.
The production brought some serious talent like Alexander Skarsgård, Noma Dumezweni, and David Dastmalchian. Sci-fi comedic drama is always difficult to do well, and I agree trying to glue on the PC subplots stood out too much. =3
I really hope the industry keeps its grubby mitts off "Snow Crash". As far as I'm concerned it could only ever be made as an epic Japanese-style animation (which the industry would never do).
Hard agree. Both Neuromancer and Snow Crash were formative, but the latter feels like it would be damaged by trying to film it, where the former has so deeply informed what film even means for so many decades that it seems more likely to survive.
I wouldn't even assume that someone bringing Snow Crash to the screen would get that it's supposed to make you laugh.
The foundation tv series is good whenever they stray from the source material. I've never watched something before that so clearly had good ideas of their own but so utterly bogged down by putting it in a framework of source material that they clearly missed the point of.
My favourite part is when main character quotes all the pacifist stuff/be machivelian instead of brute force, from the book. Then immediately goes on a murder spree.
Meh. Streaming services seem to do a thing where they put
a lot of effort into the first season to try to lure
people away from rival services. There's less motivation
to make subsequent series decent. I sort of hate what
Amazon did to The Expanse, but we did get at least two
decent seasons out of them. All the series you list here
were MUCH too slow to maintain my interest. I will give
Apple props for making second seasons that were decent.
Third and subsequent seasons probably should have not been
made. But... if you like them... you like them. I'm not
going to argue you shouldn't. I really liked the first
episode of Pluribus, the first season of For All Mankind
and Murderbot though they were all very different things.
I will argue that a steady diet of MCU movies has dulled
our visual taste-buds. As an experiment, try listening to
just the audio track. With the exception of Severance and
Murderbot it's not hard to follow the story without seeing
any of the action. Film is supposed to be a visual medium
using composition and motion to contextualize the words of
the narrative. Most of the items on the list fail in this
regard.
You can argue that Television is a writer's medium and
that we just have to cope with smaller budgets, (MUCH)
slower pacing and creators who are more used to having
readers create their own visuals in their own
imaginations. I think that's a cop out. Guess that's why
I'm not in the writers' guild.
But... if you enjoy something. Don't apologize and don't
let jerks like me diminish your enjoyment. For what they
are, most of these series are entertaining. I just get
distracted thinking about how much better they could have
been.
This Neuromancer adaptation can't avoid being difficult, as it's set in the "near future", but written 42 years ago and widely regarded as prophetic soon after.
Reality has in many ways caught up. Other works of fiction have gone ahead. Because it's a classic, so much other visual and written stories are derivative of it. So it runs the risk of looking derivative itself when brought to screen.
So much real tech is similar but not quite the same as in the book, that they will have to choose how to portray that - too close to reality and it comes across as more like a technothriller than Sci-Fi, and not prophetic at all. Too different and it could look retro, a twee "way-back-when-future".
"I steal data in cyberspace" just feels very different now that "cyberspace" is a word that we know, and stolen data online is just a grubby mundane reality. You have to change the plot points or change the tone.
Like, the scenes set in Japan. If that was current, it would be an industrial zone in China instead. But how does that deliver the "future shock" of something that hasn't happened yet? And please don't make the AI's LLMs, FFS.
Yes. Same with the continuous talk of „ice“ in the book. Will be tricky to make the whole thing not awkward especially to an audience not aware that the material is quite old
Neuromancer is my favorite book. Not one of, but the one.
After watching the trailer I must say that the overall vibe is substantially off. Very pretty, but it lacks the perpetually disoriented, if you will, atmosphere that dominates the narration in the book. It's all too clean and predictable in the trailer.
But it is a difficult book to adapt, I will give them that.
Neuromancer is my favorite book. Not one of, but the one.
Same.
After watching the trailer I must say that the overall vibe is substantially off.
Possibly. I'm not sure the trailer give us enough to really conclude that. But here's the thing... at least for me: it doesn't matter. I mean, I don't expect an adaptation of Neuromancer to be an exact match for my mental image of Neuromancer. It is, after all, an adaptation. It's going to be different. And - up to some ill-defined point - that's OK.
I just remind myself that if I want Neuromancer the way I see it in my head, I can always just read the novel again. But watching this show, I'll be trying to remind myself that it is its own work and that I shouldn't judge it by what's in my head. Hopefully I can just sit back and enjoy it and not spend too much time thinking "Oooh, that's not what the Chat is supposed to look like" or "He doesn't look like Ratz", etc.
Is there a line "too far" where it might be so different that it makes it hard to impossible for me to enjoy? I suppose. But at the very least I'm not going to make any assumptions off a 1:10 long trailer.
But it is a difficult book to adapt,
Indeed. I'm no screenwriter, so maybe this doesn't mean much, but I can't even really begin to imagine how you would adapt this and really capture all of what makes it so unique. I'm just hoping they did a reasonably credible job.
I think it's literally impossible to adapt it as written and have it appeal to a mass audience. I've been pimping the book to anyone who'd listen and most people give up after few pages. It apparently requires an effort to read... which it does.
The best books usually are quite difficult to adapt. It's a lot easier to give characters internality because you can just say what they're thinking in a book quickly in a way that's jarring in a show or movie. I can't remember the last time I heard an internal dialog on a show.
Simple: if it proves too difficult, don't do it.
I watched the trailer, and it doesn't mesh with anything I remember from the book. As the GP says, the book is disorienting. Not because of internal monologue, but because of the language. It places new words in essential places, where you can't really parse the sentence, and have to form some sort of impression. The rest of the imagery has been done to death. Some bits from the trailer looked a lot like Blade Runner. But the neologisms, feeling out of depth, that's an essential part of the book, never done in movies AFAIK, and I don't see it in the trailer.
Gibson jumps into lingo as if we knew what the hell it meant (and we didn’t) so we felt the disorientation ourselves.
Such an amazing book. I eventually tracked down a signed first edition.
I'm reading The Peripheral (2014) by William Gibson, and it does exactly this. The lingo starts on page one, and then it's meaning is slowly revealed throughout the book. I don't know if this pattern has a name, but it's very pronounced.
There's a few different terms that get used for it. Argot is the name for that kind of secret or subgroup specific vocabulary. Then deep end world building is a more general term for just dumping the reader into the world with limited to no preamble to familiarize them with the world.
Neal Stephensons Anathem did that do me, took me quite a lot of pages to get behind some of the words. Loved that. Can you recommend other authors who do that?
"Riddley Walker" is famous for that, although i think it takes it too far.
Not sure if that's because it's not going to be there or if it's just the parts the trailer covers don't have Gibson's brand of techno-babble in it or if they were selected to not have it to not confuse people in the teaser.
Dexter had the best internal dialog I can remember; it's like the protagonist had two greatly contrasting personalities (his outward demeanor and then his internal dialog) which were constantly riffing off each other on screen, though it never got in the way. Just pitch perfect throughout.
For a show where the internal dialog eventually does become a bit annoying, look at You (in my mind, greatly inspired by Dexter).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7335184/
Dexter might have been the last one I watched that featured it heavily for sure. At least among live action I guess I should caveat, anime still uses it quite a bit as a shortcut.
Mr. Robot also did it well I think. But that show also basically is an adaptation of Fight Club which is an adaptation of a novel.
It's disoriented because Case is disoriented; he is a pinball being hit by bumpers and levers.
Except when he's in cyberspace; that's where he has enough expertise to have agency. But he's still, mostly, being used.
Yeah, this is what I bounced off hard when I watched the trailers also - too clean. No edge. Where's the punk in any of this?
No thanks. Pass.
Trailer doesn't match the way I pictured it when I read it as a kid (which wasn't that long after it was published).
That's fine, that's usually the case, few adaptations get close to what you build in your head (The Expanse did, it pretty much nailed that which is I suspect why I liked it so much) but yeah, the world looks too clean.
Looks bad. It does not look nowhere near as dark and dystopic. Looks like a comic con in NYC. Altered Carbon S1 nailed it, also Ghost in the Shell (the live action film with Scarlett Johanson)... that's like peak cyberpunk aesthetic in recent years, this looks like too pretty on purpose. Cast looks weak as well.
Agree. Had this conversation with a good friend; we both very much enjoyed the books.
My main problem: it feels far too clean and fan-servicy, which is weird to consider, given I’m a fan of the source material.
I don’t want to be pandered to, as a fan. This feels too safe and polished. I don’t want the Apple Store version of The Sprawl.
William Gibson himself worked on it so my hopes are high. All great books are difficult to adapt and none of them will ever match what we imagined ourselves while reading them.
Yeah, i'd agree looks way to clean.
I think the trailer has a generic action movie vibe which feels offputting.
Trailer here: https://youtu.be/g79GPZSQHBk?si=pKhadWftcz8WMjyW
Waaaaaay to clean. The video started in 240p and looked promising but no. Also whatsup with the Gaspar Noe title screens
In the late 90’s it looked like we were going to get a Neuromancer film by the amazing director Chris Cunningham, known for his Aphex Twin and Bjork videos. Gibson strongly approved of Cunningham, reportedly stating he was the only person he had met whom he trusted to do the adaptation justice. Sadly, it never came to be.
Chris Cunningham spoke later about how he had to leave Hollywood due to a desire for complete creative control and frustration with the studio system. He was never going to make this movie. I think Gibson liked bold auteur types but they tend to also be the types who won't be told what to do. We saw the same conflict with Lynch's Dune, essentially something that could have been a masterpiece just mired in studio politics and executive control and executive final cuts.
When I first read Neuromancer I wanted it to be adapted into a film. I think the reason was a common one: when you love a book you want there to be some validation of your affection from the rest of the world. A bunch of people deciding to make a movie feels like validation, especially if it goes on to be wildly successful.
Over the years and many successive readings my feelings have changed. In some ways, a screen adaptation make less sense with every passing year. As Gibson himself points out, sci-fi works are always a commentary about the time in which they are written, not the future time in which they seem to take place and there's a lot of the 1980's in Neuromancer, from punk-rock counterculture to the Cold Way, from payphones to the technological ascendancy of Japan, and I'm not sure how much it would feel like the novel if all that stuff is taken out or changed. Also, presumably because it's been in production hell for so long it's already been kinda strip-mined by other works. There's a lot of Neuromancer in The Matrix as well as echoes of it in a bunch of lesser films from the 90's (e.g. Lawnmower Man, Hackers, Ghost in the Shell), to say nothing of Cyberpunk 2077.
Lastly, films like Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic have shown us that attempts to cinematically depict cyberspace can end up looking laughably ridiculous. I observe that there is essentially no depiction of it in the series trailer/preview. I wonder if they'll try to side-step its depiction as much as possible.
I'll probably end up watching it, if for no other reason than to see how they approach all of the above but I've largely given up on hoping it will capture the mood and feeling of the novel. It's even possible that it ends up falling into the "very good but very different" category of things like The Haunting of Hill House, Foundation, The Shining etc. I'd settle for that.
In some ways, a screen adaptation make less sense with every passing year.
I normally agree, but with AI agents I find myself thinking about Neuromancer frequently. Somedays I feel like a Netrunner with what my AI and I can do. I am also now getting slightly paranoid of what other people and their AIs can do. I bought a 'deck' (GPU) for the first time in a decade and my office glows with color and once again has the reassuring sound of whirring fans. I've attempted to secure my network like I never have before and have my AI watching over it. It can take some automated actions but not enough for it to automatically defend...yet. Maybe I feel more like a shitty Netrunner at this point :)
Even posts about hacking into your own air purifier[1] make me feel like we have the power again. Some of that naive? 90's era optimism. Regardless, I hope the show is good!
[1] https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-11-11-reverse-engineering-my-...
I've read neuromancer a few times and it's one of those rare books that always holds up. It's a stream of words plugged directly into my imagination and I see that world in my own way, lingering around and filling in the spaces Gibson describes.
It's nice that people are putting a lot of effort into making a movie about it but for me watching would be like taking the tourist bus around a place I already know and love.
I'd feel something similar if they did The Mote In God's Eye, with the difference that I think curiosity would get the better of me there.
For anyone else that was confused, I think they meant "Sprawl Trilogy" instead.
I still need to finish Count Zero and I've never read Mona Lisa Overdrive. Regardless hope all is well
I'm hyped for this, hope it makes justice to the book. The cast looks spot on, let's see how they imagined Freeside, Chiba and my favourite: the orbital Rastafarian colony Zion.
I've read Neuromancer and liked it back in 2002, as a teenager. And whenever rumors about an adaptation came up, I was curious.
So in that 42-year journey I was along for 24 years.
I think the adaptation will probably be neither a masterpiece nor a flop. So... kinda anticlimactic: wait for 24 years and get some "middle ground" that will be mostly forgotten in the end.
But still, it's interesting for me to see it. Because Gibson dreamed the cyberpunk, and we kinda live it. AI is one of the main characters in Neuromancer. And AI is what we talk about all day nowadays. Of course, there's a world of difference between his vision and our reality... But the more interesting it is to compare.
> I think the adaptation will probably be neither a masterpiece nor a flop.
Ender's Game comes to mind. Not a masterpiece, but severely underrated.
Gibson is an absolute prophet. How did he know that four decades later memory chips will be like gold?
[dead]
I read the book for the first time last year. It was a bit of a drag to read unfortunately. I understand that it's pioneering, but much of it's content has been done a lot in other media, leaving it feeling derivative (even though I know it's the other way around). The John Carter movie gave me similar vibes when I watched it.
Read Naked Lunch by Burroughs, then read Neuromancer. Then read The Ticket That Exploded by Burroughs.
Gibson has mentioned he was greatly influenced by the beats (Burroughs is sometimes called the godfather of the beats) and it very much shows. Somewhere in the 80s people picked up on Orwell's style and encouraged everyone to eschew anything that wasn't short sentences describing physical characteristics.
I don't know if Gibson was trying to make a "difficult to read" text, but his influences were pretty clear about how they cared more about the immediacy of emotional impact than clear prose.
This confused me, because I thought you were referring to Edgar Rice Burroughs. You were referring to William S. Burroughs, whom I have never heard of before.
Lol. Yes. Sorry for the confusion. Now I can't help but think what if William S. Burroughs had written "A Princess of Mars." I believe it would have been a very different book.
I tried to read it in college in the 80s, but I couldn't get into it.
I agree with this- it birthed Cyberpunk but others ran with it.
I hope they find and hire whoever is to Neuromancer what Henry Cavill is to Warhammer, if they haven't already.
(Reads:_) "From competent space hippies, into incompetent space hippies."
Thinks... there was an arcade...not? Is it an 21th century interactive movie, where characters can be flipped via Objects=>"AI"=>Moddeling/for entertainment purpose ?
Thinks again... hippies, well... some think that "AI" makes "Revivals" and "Offspins"...likely, while reaching a bigger crowd... /Think of Realtime-Resync-Language-Modells, trained while People chatting...
(Reads again:_) "Readers create their own visuals in their own imaginations."
But "AI" nor "interactive" stuff would...?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V1WylXkkxA
...so..."but the arcade-machine said 'bruce lee' ?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maBfF1TDNUE
...just wondering... enjoy your weekend... (-:
The fact that we get a Neuromancer movie made by an Internet streaming service owned by one of the founding companies of the personal computing revolution, which is now the most valuable company in the world, is somehow quite fitting for a cyberpunk story...
Yeah, maybe I will finally able to understand what that book was about.
I started reading it as a teenager and found it essentially unreadable, and quickly moved on to something else. I wonder if I'd find it any better as an adult...
Gibson has had his fingers in this. I hope that leads them away from making this a complete wash. Even if it flops, maybe it'll get the ball rolling on more media critical of our apparent now and near future prospects (with a little pizazz)
I hope real true fans and talented people that make, produce, and direct it and it's not just a cash grab like so many modern nostalgia works (Star Wars, Rings of Power, etc.).
Neuromancer is a classic, and given the popular genre it shouldn't get too cheesy. Yet, after Murderbot I would remain cautiously optimistic. ymmv =3
It was okay, but was a bit disappointing changing the colonists from competent space hippies, into incompetent space hippies. The weird digression from the book at the 2/3 mark of the season seemed purely to try to contort the story back around this unnecessary change.
The production brought some serious talent like Alexander Skarsgård, Noma Dumezweni, and David Dastmalchian. Sci-fi comedic drama is always difficult to do well, and I agree trying to glue on the PC subplots stood out too much. =3
Same here.
I really hope the industry keeps its grubby mitts off "Snow Crash". As far as I'm concerned it could only ever be made as an epic Japanese-style animation (which the industry would never do).
Hard agree. Both Neuromancer and Snow Crash were formative, but the latter feels like it would be damaged by trying to film it, where the former has so deeply informed what film even means for so many decades that it seems more likely to survive.
I wouldn't even assume that someone bringing Snow Crash to the screen would get that it's supposed to make you laugh.
https://archive.ph/fYKqq
I hope it's really good.
Skipped the Foundation, will skip this too most likely.
Foundation (on AppleTV) is simply a different story set in a similar universe. It’s a good story, worth watching imo.
If you changed the names I wouldn't have been able to guess it was supposed to be related to those books
The foundation tv series is good whenever they stray from the source material. I've never watched something before that so clearly had good ideas of their own but so utterly bogged down by putting it in a framework of source material that they clearly missed the point of.
My favourite part is when main character quotes all the pacifist stuff/be machivelian instead of brute force, from the book. Then immediately goes on a murder spree.
I haven't been disappointed with the SF shows coming from Apple TV. Hopefully this is another great show.
Can you give some recommendations?
Silo is best imo. The upcoming season 4 is supposed to complete the story.
The first seasons of Dark Matter and Severance were great. Murderbot was good, but not great.
Great:
- Severance: psycho thriller in a time where people can surgically split their memories between work and personal life
- Foundation: space opera and politics, visually stunning
- Silo: dystopian thriller where people live in underground bunkers for mysterious reasons
- Pluribus: comedy/drama/psycho thriller where an alien virus takes control of every human on earth, except for Carol
Good:
- For All Manking: alternate history, space exploration, geopolitics (first two seasons are great)
- Dark Matter: drama thriller about the multiverse
- Murderbot: robot soldier that becomes self aware, comedy
Silo is awesome
Sugar
This Neuromancer adaptation can't avoid being difficult, as it's set in the "near future", but written 42 years ago and widely regarded as prophetic soon after.
Reality has in many ways caught up. Other works of fiction have gone ahead. Because it's a classic, so much other visual and written stories are derivative of it. So it runs the risk of looking derivative itself when brought to screen.
So much real tech is similar but not quite the same as in the book, that they will have to choose how to portray that - too close to reality and it comes across as more like a technothriller than Sci-Fi, and not prophetic at all. Too different and it could look retro, a twee "way-back-when-future".
"I steal data in cyberspace" just feels very different now that "cyberspace" is a word that we know, and stolen data online is just a grubby mundane reality. You have to change the plot points or change the tone.
Like, the scenes set in Japan. If that was current, it would be an industrial zone in China instead. But how does that deliver the "future shock" of something that hasn't happened yet? And please don't make the AI's LLMs, FFS.
Yes. Same with the continuous talk of „ice“ in the book. Will be tricky to make the whole thing not awkward especially to an audience not aware that the material is quite old
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