7 ms·
Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?
- westmeal 4y agoThis is one of my favorite novels so I hope so. Hell, I'd even settle for the other two sprawl books.
- kfrzcode 4y agoI have really enjoyed The Peripheral and found it to be a nice accompaniment to the books. Sprawl would be sick.
- cgh 4y agoYeah, The Peripheral is quite good. Gibson seems pretty happy with the adaptation too, which is a good sign. I still haven't read the books. The Sprawl trilogy was one of my favourite series when I was young. I'd like to see it adapted so that it had the same "dent in the universe" effect it had when it was published.
- moomin 4y agoThe thing with The Peripheral adaptation: there’s basically no cyberpunk aesthetic in it. The near-future stuff is done very naturalistically. The content remains pure Gibson.
- solomonb 4y agoI found the pacing on the show to be way too fast but I enjoyed it. Television and movies in general are afraid of moving slowly now-a-days. I think this is a big problem for most book-to-screen adaptations.
- tgv 4y agoI started watching, because I was lazy and Prime recommended it, and stopped after about 20 minutes in. My impression in that time was "Rebel teenage girl outsmarts everyone in overdone and ugly CGI but we've added something about neuro to make it look sci-fi". It felt like the Hunger Games, but less realistic. I did not know at the time it was written by Gibson, who I admire as an author, but also it did not come to my mind that it could have possibly been written by him. Is the screen adaptation so different from the book, or did they add filler to make 8 (or more?) episodes?
- kfrzcode 4y agoNah, keep going. At least watch the first episode through.
- jdkee 4y agoIt would have been great if the tv adaptation did not stray so far from the book in later episodes.
- semiquaver 4y agoIt’s only a matter of time before Snow Crash finally follows in suit...
- humanistbot 4y agoI'm surprised that Snow Crash hasn't been adapted yet. As others commented, most of Neuromancer's plot has become recycled by what came after. But Snow Crash is to cyberpunk what The Boys is to superhero movies: a satirical take on corporate America. This should be especially popular at our current moment with the impending collapse of Meta's Verse (I refuse to let them own "metaverse")
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- romwell 4y ago>I'm surprised that Snow Crash hasn't been adapted yet It's because there's a pedo rape scene in the book that's central to the plot, and the book itself doesn't disapprove of it in any way. Neither do Neal Stephenson's fans, apparently[1]. The extra creepy factor is that the pedo rape scene is written by the (then) 33-year-old man from the perspective of the 15-year-old girl who doesn't see it as bad thing. I loved the book, but I wish ol' Neal did a second edition with someone giving adults lasting after the 15-year-old in the book as little as look disapproval to hint that, maybe, sexualizing 15 year olds is as bad as glorifying corporations. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/gua46b/am_i_the_only_one_who_finds_snow_crash_creepy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/gua46b/am_i...
- shadowofneptune 4y agoA film adaptation of Neuromancer loses my favorite part of it, the writing. The most famous part of the book is its opening line: 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.' It feels more like reading verse than prose, and it's worth it to read it just for that. Take that away and what is left? It's published far back enough that unique elements of its plot should already be familiar to audiences from its imitators. The characters to me are not very memorable (maybe Wintergreen is). Gibson found that Blade Runner looked exactly like what he had in mind for Neuromancer. There's no meat to the book without it being a book.
- genezeta 4y ago> Wintergreen Wintermute :)
- UI_at_80x24 4y agoThere is a street in my town with this name. I've been tempted to steal the streetsign!
- shadowofneptune 4y agoOops! Less memorable than I thought. Its concept is, at least: it's close to being the villain of the story, Case its hapless pawn, yet it's also a captive. There are some parts of the plot I do like, even if it's not a draw as a whole.
- tgv 4y agoThe language in Neuromancer was almost impenetrable to me. You just have to accept it and let it wash over you, which creates a unique effect (practically literally, since everyone will have slightly different associations with the neo words). But the result is that the words are less memorable. What sticks are words that we know and somehow are half-associated. In retrospect, the book also teaches a thing about memory.
- 4y ago
- sp332 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20221203202712/https://j-nelson.net/2022/12/will-we-finally-see-neuromancer-on-the-screen/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221203202712/https://j-nelson....
- pelorat 4y agoNeeds to be the whole trilogy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alphabetting 4y agoI'd pony up for apple tv in a split second for this if they make it. Must read if you're into sci fi with AI and cyberpunk themes.
- karaterobot 4y agoI don't really need Neuromancer to be a movie. I'd rather they make a new cyberpunk story that is just as stylish and creative. Something that will influence the next 30 years. I know there are people in the world who have the talent to do that, and would like to do it. I bet they're all working on licensed IP right now though, since that's where the work is. I guess we get the culture we pay for.
- midoridensha 4y agoThey should try to pull off something the way Blade Runner did 40 years ago. Blade Runner was allegedly an adaptation of a PKD story, but in reality it barely resembled the source material, and just took some inspiration and the basic premise from it. Then again, Blade Runner was a flop at the time... But these days with streaming services targeting more niche audiences, maybe it could be done better. Just look at the success of "The Expanse". It didn't treat the viewers as complete idiots.
- bpiche 4y agoScenes from our favorite books often get left on the cutting room floor. Personally, I hope they don't only nail the flechette-ridden action scenes but also some of the quieter and more poetic ones, like when Case wakes up in the loft and is able to use the matrix again. Getting his fix again after being on the wagon for so long. “And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”
- mortenjorck 4y agoI went looking for a comment I remembered posting on a previous occasion of an impending Neuromancer adaptation, and found the story from 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565734 I think it still holds up 11 years later: > It's almost certainly too much to hope for, but my impossible dream is that this gets done up like it's the 1980s with circa-2012 CGI. A bold kind of retrofuturism we haven't seen yet in film. > Thing is, you can't take Neuromancer out of the '80s. The newness of computer networks, the ascendancy of Japan, the aesthetics of computer hardware -- boxy, whirring things with stark, green CRTs spewing masses of indecipherable alphanumeric incantations, big clunky cables, heavy briefcase-size mobile units; it's all there. And the mash-up of digital and analog technologies is no less integral than Gibson's opening lines to the book, comparing a halogen-hazed night sky to the analog noise of TV transmission. > Neuromancer didn't arrive into a world comfortable with computer technology like ours today. The book stands as a fantastic trip back into a time when technology could be dark, dangerous, and foreign, a zeitgeist Gibson leverages to dazzling effect. "Updating" Neuromancer would bring its entire shadowy world out into the unthreatening, mid-day sun.
- tgv 4y agoThey could if they were imaginative enough to project current tech into a similarly dangerous future. It's been said that sci-fi is the easiest to date form of film. Our image of the future is so strongly tied to the moment itself.
- ninth_ant 4y agoInteresting that the blog author dreads a serial adaptation. If anything I would dread a movie adaptation as the limited time and the pacing requirements make it difficult to avoid rushing through the story and skipping much of the worldbuilding. They use Foundation as an example of why serialized adaptations are poor, but this understates the difficulty of the task in adopting a set of short stories that sprawl over worlds and eras, featuring complex ideas. I have a hard time believing a movie format could do a superior job with Foundation.
- Apocryphon 4y agoFor the Foundation, you really need the extra hours to chronicle an epic future historical drama with a lot of psychological themes and political intrigue. I'd have to say I'm rather worried about the upcoming Hyperion adaptation from Bradley Cooper for similar reasons, it was to be a show but now it's going to be a movie.
- midoridensha 4y agoGame of Thrones is an example of why serialized adaptations can be great. Apparently (I haven't seen it for myself, but all the reviews suck), Foundation is simply not such an example. This doesn't mean serialized adaptations don't work. Similarly, I can find lots of examples of movie adaptations that suck; this doesn't mean movie adaptations can't work.
- Apocryphon 4y agoI'm going to be Pollyanna and say that we might be at the cusp of a golden age of sci-fi adaptations. For decades people said that Dune was unfilmable and then Villeneuve went and done it and made it look easy, even conventional. (I actually have some additional thoughts on that- it could have been a little bit longer for greater exposition and characterization, and more weird.) So this should mean that any classic work of sci-fi should get some consideration. We're at a time in the industry where both visual effects and audiences (with the mainstreaming of nerd culture) are ready for such media. That's not to say these adaptations will be good, but they're certainly filmable. Neuromancer gets a lot of cachet, but other IPs have been attempted already. Villeneuve successfully made a good Blade Runner sequel. Live-action Ghost in the Shell happened- it was execrable and wrapped up in controversy, but it still got made and the neon-soaked setting looked decent. They made a fourth Matrix. Stepping away from cyberpunk, Childhood's End got a miniseries. The Expanse got a full show. So I doubt that there's anything inherently more difficult about Gibson's novels. If anything, the popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 and its Edgerunners anime has primed the public for '80s retrofuturistic cyberpunk, so they can choose to adapt this as a period piece if they wanted to, without "modernizing" its futuristic conceits. No need to add smartphones. Call me when they start adapting John Brunner '60s new wave sci-fi. Now that would be a hard sell.
- mnky9800n 4y agoTbh I thought David Lynchs Dune captured the oddity of the universe, the cruelty of the universe, and did it's own stuff as well. I know not everyone likes it, but I think it has it's place, especially in the context of all his other movies and tv shows.
- at_a_remove 4y agoI strongly agree with you. Dune is weird, insular, looped back on itself, and has had thousands of years to do so. They've switched from one "sin" (making a machine in the likeness of the human mind) to another (thou shalt not deform the soul, by the creation of ultraspecialized humans such as Mentats). It's a nasty, paranoid place (the voice-overs helped with that), wherein you constantly had to think about how others would think, and on. The Weirding Way is essentially something that cannot be filmed (you would have to invent a martial art that looked unique, spectacular on screen, and was somehow wildly effective), and so it became the Weirding Modules, and that worked, too. Herbert like the "third stage" Guild Navigator idea so much he incorporated it into his later works. This later effort left me cold.
- sonofhans 4y agoHonestly? I hope not. If a true visionary were to direct it, Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott in their prime, or Denis Villeneuve, who seems to be able to do impossible things — maybe. Otherwise I’d expect it to be as dull and forgettable as most movies made from PKD sources — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_by_Philip_K._Dick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_b... I saw William Gibson read at Powell’s years ago, maybe around the Virtual Light era. Someone asked him about Johnny Mnemonic, about why Molly Millions wasn’t in it. He said something like, “I thought they were going to fuck up the movie, and if I’d let them write Molly into it then the studio would own her and I’d never be able to have her in a better movie.” So I’d hope that Gibson is involved in this, and has higher expectations or involvement than before.
- jjulius 4y agoI have 0 hope, given the people involved. >Graham Roland will serve as a writer, producer, and showrunner of Neuromancer. He is best known for his work on the hit show Lost and Amazon Prime Video’s Jack Ryan. Author William Gibson will also serve as an executive producer. We can also reveal that at least one episode will be directed by J.D. Dillard. His newest film, Devotion, based on a true story war drama starring Jonathan Majors (Lovecraft Country) and Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) is currently playing in theaters. Besides that, he is best known for his work on The Outsider. [0]https://www.theilluminerdi.com/2022/11/29/neuromancer-eyes-miles-teller/ https://www.theilluminerdi.com/2022/11/29/neuromancer-eyes-m...
- sp332 4y agoRoland only wrote for the last (sixth) season of Lost.
- tangentland 4y agoOut of the sprawl trilogy, I'd say Mona Lisa Overdrive would probably make the better "movie". Unfortunately, Molly is difficult character to use as the common thread. Don't get me wrong, I love Molly as a character and she is perfect to connect the books, but I cannot see using her ambivalence to the world as the connective tissue between "movies". And if we're mentioning sci-fi books that should be turned into movies, Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age is high on my list.
- badcppdev 4y agoI think parts of Diamond Age could look absolutely brilliant in a Hollywood film. But I cannot imagine how you would include the Hackworth/Alchemist/Drummer concepts. Damn I have to read that book again.
- juancn 4y agoIt's very easy to ruin Neuromancer in an adaptation. I'm kind of skeptic after seeing the adaptation of "The Peripheral", which IMHO misses the most important parts (and characters) of the book and waters it down into an action series. All the social criticism gets diluted. On the other hand, somebody adapted "The Expanse" brilliantly, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
- TurkTurkleton 4y agoI think the The Expanse's TV adaptation turned out so well thanks in large part to the involvement of the original authors as writers and producers on the show.
- jzellis 4y agoI've always wanted to do a Neuromancer adaptation that uses modern film and CG tech but is shot with the aesthetic and general tech level of 1984 - everybody smokes, you don't take out the USSR refs, period music, lots of Ridley Scott dry ice, the works. Except the theme song is Lali Puna's cover of "Together In Electric Dreams", because it is perfect. https://youtu.be/MjnpCd7sAqI https://youtu.be/MjnpCd7sAqI
- krapp 4y agoI hope not. Neuromancer is one of those properties that's so influential on the cyberpunk genre and which is such a product of its time (what with the mainframes and cassette tapes and "cyberspace" completely devoid of the internet and internet culture) that the more faithful an adaptation is, the more derivative and dated it would appear... and ironically more banal, since the real world has become more cyberpunk than cyberpunk in many ways. Gibson himself feared it was obsolete when he saw Blade Runner before he had even finished the manuscript for Neuromancer. Few of its themes really resonate with our modern technological surveillance dystopia, simply because it predates them all, and those which do I fear have been outdone since. I mean, its iconic opening line no longer even makes sense in a world that's moved on from cathode ray tubes and static. It's a future that still has pay phones. Metropolis is entering the public domain on January 1. I find the potential of that far more interesting than an adaptation of Neuromancer. Or better, instead of Neuromancer, adapt one of Gibson's more modern properties.