Hacker Cinema
Neuromancer
2027 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Graham Roland, J.D. Dillard
A disgraced superhacker and a razorgirl assassin are recruited for a high-stakes heist targeting a powerful corporate dynasty with untold wealth...and secrets they'd kill to protect.
8 positive4 negative1 mixed39 neutralfrom 52 commenters
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56 comments on Hacker News
I've seen a few people complain that the first trailer for the Neuromancer TV show looks "too bright" or "too clean." I think the real difference is that they're consciously trying to avoid that Blade Runner aesthetic, which includes avoiding the "never get brighter than dusk" trope.
>Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.
Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.
My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
I think there was a case of a movie reviewer for some newspaper panning LOTR because of how "generic" and "derivative" it was. I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, though, but I can see it happening.
I also think its going to be a problem for the upcoming Neuromancer series. Unless they change a lot of things, the plot as written is practically cliche at this point, and a lot of it doesn't even make sense outside of the specific technological and political context of the time.
I was hoping for a Snow Crash series (like a multi-season upfront commitment to one, not something with a possibility of not showing an ending. Two seasons or three maybe) for years, but that book now seems so quaint that I doubt it would even make sense as a television series now. Neuromancer seems like such a cold, relatively emotionless book to adapt. I might give the first episode a go.
Replying because it seems we both look for books we have read to sort of match up with our mental representations of filmed versions them.
Was myself grossly disappointed with the Wheel of Time series.
>>Do they even have direct access to published works to use as reference material?
I mean, clearly, given that it did answer my question eventually. Also wasn't it a whole thing that these models got trained on entire book libraries(without necessarily paying for that).
>>I wouldn't expect any LLM to be able to respect such a request
Why though? They seem to know everything about everything, why not this specifically. You can ask it to tell you the plot of pretty much any book/film/game made in the last 100 years and it will tell you. Maybe asking about specific chapters was too much, but Neuromancer exists in free copies all over the internet and it's been discussed to death, if it was a book that came out last year then ok, fair enough, but LLMs had 40 years of discussions about Neuromancer to train on.
But besides, regardless of everything else - if I say "don't spoil the rest of the book" and your response includes "in the last chapter character X dies" then you just failed at basic comprehension? Whether an LLM has any knowledge of the book or not, whether that is even true or not, that should be an unacceptable outcome.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.
Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)
It's not really even technical garbage. From many throwaway lines it's clear that the writers actually knew their stuff. They just chose to not make a hacking movie based on realism (because boring) but based on the zeitgeist, the computer tropes of the 80s and early 90s, and the concept of "cyberspace" as envisioned by Gibson and made its way to the collective consciousness. In a time when virtual reality and 3D graphics were at peak cool, yet most people had no experience with computer networks, or even computers at all.
"Cyberspace […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." – Neuromancer
I sometimes wonder if there are people out there who just read too much Neuromancer, and they think they can construct their own Tessier-Ashpool orbital dynasty.
I suppose there are several other Oligarchs In Space stories and movies since then, but if the point of the space station is to host AI, that narrows it down a bit.
Or perhaps it's performative, designed to spook gullible politicians into changing laws to "keep" businesses that were never actually going to go somewhere else anyway.
I see there's a TV adaptation of Neuromancer coming out.
I'm a little disappointed that they didn't have it directed by an AI reconstruction of David Lynch, because that would have been so very fitting.
This will be tough after what CD Projekt Red were able to come up with their phenomenal take on CP2020..
Neuromancer also "needs" a proper movie adaptation not a TV show.
I'm very skeptical about this, but let's see...
"How to make neuromancer into a tv show/movie" is one of my favorite idle past-times, and for a long time, I used to think about how it would have to be updated to make sense with current technology, but after playing Cyberpunk 2077, I think they should fully commit to retro-futurism, and keep everything _exactly as it is in the book_, and just make it the future as seen from 1983, banks of pay phones and all.
I just don't think there's any way to update the technology and keep the story as it was written coherent, and I don't think it's necessary.
It’s amazing how many times a Neuromancer adaptation has been optioned, in development, and then fizzled out.
There’s a comment I posted on a previous occasion, all the way back in 2011 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565734), that I think still holds up 13 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.
If any streaming service has proven hospitable to retro futurism, it’s Apple TV+. I'm cautiously very hopeful that the Sprawl has finally found the right home for a translation to screen.
I really enjoyed the Neuromancer book so hopefully Apple can make something of quality. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for The Peripheral, which was an ok book, but got a strange TV show adaptation (and I wasn't surprised at all to see it get cancelled after one season).
Foundation was near-unadaptable as-is, given that it spans eras and wants the user to emotionally attach to the structure, rather than the individuals. For TV shows, audiences generally attach to characters (and the actors and actresses that play them), and the kind of story that allows a single cast to span eras would need to engage with some degree of time travel, cycles of life and/or abuse, or immortality, none of which fit in with Foundation.
That said, Neuromancer is a book that's more "cool" than good; Gibson is very good at painting pictures with words, but story itself is something of a convoluted mess. Hopefully an adaptation can give the writers a chance to smooth out the elements that don't work.
> His later work is far more subtle, sort of about the pervasiveness of dystopian corporate cyberpunk themes underneath modern culture and style?
I sort of guessed that was where he went with his later work based on book descriptions, but honestly I still plan to read them because that idea is very interesting to me, and I want to read everything I can from authors I respect in order to try to learn as much about writing as possible from them, but you're right, I will probably like them less on a personal level.
For me, the appeal of cyberpunk is taking the dystopian parts of our society — surveillance capitalism, corporate omnipotence, consumerism, commodification, atomization, helplessness, poverty, all the subtle yet inescapable webs entangling us that are usually hidden beneath smiling signs and catchy slogans — and just putting it completely on the table, in full view. Cyberpunk is "hyper-real" — this painfully heightened reality writers can use as a tool to throw the hidden bones of our constructed reality into sharp relief like an X-ray, so that when the reader comes back to the regular world they can't stop seeing everything they saw, like an after image that won't go away even when you close your eyes. The sort of raw sex and drugs and hyper self-expression through transhumanism and so on, the cool factor — that's all almost like a cathartic reward for the dystopian aspects of the setting, while also integrating with those aspects and complexifying the commentary, instead of allowing you to escape it. More subtle commentary has its place, but cyberpunk as a genre is unique, and I think we need more of it.
> If you do want more Neuromancer, I'd recommend Richard K. Morgan's trilogy [0] (for god's sake, the books, not the TV series), Ian M. Banks' Culture books [1] (although maybe start with Excession, and read the others if you like it), or go retro for the original cyberpunk short story collections [2].
Thanks for the recs! All of those are very much on my tbr, although I'm struggling to get into altered carbon for personal reasons unrelated to the stuff I've mentioned previously ;P
> Do you have a link to where I can find your work?
I'm extremely flattered you ask! I haven't put any of my work up anywhere yet because most of my completed stuff is very early — when I was still finding my style and footing — and most of my mature, refined work is as of yet unfinished. I am however currently working on a cycle of novellas (titled Spectrum Fold :)) set in a sort of Gothic cyber+punk post-apocalyptic world deeply inspired by Gibson, Reynolds, R. Talosorian Games, and media like Edgerunners, Fight Club, Dark City, and The Crow. Depending on how comfortable you are with heavy queer and trauma themes (as well as the usual sex, drugs, violence, poverty, etc), if you send me an email I'll send you a link to my first novella when it's ready for release (probably later this year). I'll be publishing it as a DRM free epub on my self hosted server lol.
I'm enjoying the hell out of the Foundation series, and the first couple episodes of Shogun have been great. I'll probably love Neuromancer as well. The trick to enjoying film/TV adaptations of books is to never read the books beforehand.
You probably don't want to read his post-Sprawl/Bridge books, then. ;)
In response to the fan complaining, he said something to the effect of 'I wrote Necromancer when I was a young man, and that sort of thing doesn't interest me anymore.'
His later work is far more subtle, sort of about the pervasiveness of dystopian corporate cyberpunk themes underneath modern culture and style?
If you do want more Neuromancer, I'd recommend Richard K. Morgan's trilogy [0] (for god's sake, the books, not the TV series), Ian M. Banks' Culture books [1] (although maybe start with Excession, and read the others if you like it), or go retro for the original cyberpunk short story collections [2].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades
Do you have a link to where I can find your work?
Both Kurt Vonnegut and Neal Stephenson seek to plumb the intersection between technology and religion, between science and popular culture - but where Vonnegut adheres to the literary traditions of the Western Satirical Canon, Stephenson choose to plough a far more meta-referential narrative path that is weighted by all the detrimental issues associated with Young Adult fiction without representing any of the strengths of the genre.
This is fairly understandable when you look at their respective backgrounds. Vonnegut was a Combat Infantry veteran, earning a Purple Heart in World War 2. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned - emerging to find an alien landscape not unlike the moon. This was, in fact, the eponymous 'Slaughterhouse Five' from which his magnum opus takes its name.
His use of satire, gallows humour and science fiction was rooted in the tradition of the golden era of Science Fiction - namely, the use of these literary devices to try and make sense of a seemingly uncaring and alien world and society that was changing with unprecedented rapidity.
You see Joseph Heller doing very similar in 'Catch 22' when utilising similar narrative devices like non-chronological timelines, omniscient 3rd person narrators, and satirical paradoxes to describe and to try and make sense of his own brutal and often paradoxical experiences serving in the Korean War.
Stephenson, in contrast, is mired in the self-referential and meta posturing of late 80s American University culture - as befitted his first and possibly most insightful book 'The Big U' - a scathing indictment of the homogenisation of the American University system as it geared towards research over pure academia.
The book he is most lauded for - Snow Crash - is in many ways a poor facsimile of Gibson's Neuromancer. Even the title, which Stephenson contends was a result of his computer crashing with a malformed bitmap that '...looked vaguely like static on a broken television set—a 'snow crash...' is lifted conceptually from the opening pages of Neuromancer - "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.".
The plotting characterisation and story beats when not directly lifted from Neuromancer, are reinterpreted chunks of Philip K Dicks 'A Scanner Darkly' and the 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' respectively, and what little innovation he brings to the world building is mired in a comic book aesthetic, versus the film noir salience of Neuromancer.
Many would content that this is the point - that Stephenson is playing with the tropes of the Cyberpunk genre. Unfortunately this doesn't explain away his stylistic choice (or sheer lack of ability) to avoid huge explanatory passages that destroy any semblance of pacing or advancing a narrative midway through the book. This, in many ways, is indicative of the 'tell, don't show' fumbling of Cory Doctorow in the way he punches down to his predominantly YA audience.
The BBC did a pretty good audio adaptation of Neuromancer. You can listen to it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo
Neuromancer would be hard to do well as a film. But as fairly short TV series it would be excellent. There is huge potential as well because you could do, say Neuromancer in 4 hours and then do the rest of the trilogy.
The best screen adaptation of a book I know of, Brideshead Revisited from 1981, took the book almost word for word and made a fairly long TV series. Neuromancer and the rest of the trilogy could be done the same way.
Modern film making technology can probably do much better justice to a book like Neuromancer but the technology isn't the most important part. The BBC did a radio adaptation almost 20 years ago and you can find it on YouTube and other places. I enjoyed it and it is worth listening to.
I try to keep an open mind.
e.g. I was not holding out much hope when "Damon Lindelof producer of Lost, decided what we really needed was for him to create a new TV series in the Watchman universe"
Whether Neuromancer works out, I have no idea. There's no end of money being wasted by the streamers on prestigious properties - but occasionally you'll get a Watchmen or Good Omens or Sandman.
Other positive is that we're living in a time where these can be "done justice". If it needs to cost $15M an hour to make and run for 10 hours to tell the story properly - well it now can be made.
It might not be told well, it might make bile spew from my very core - but somebody can have a crack at it.
My question is, how do you make Neuromancer almost 25 years after The Matrix, which was built on the precepts of Neuromancer, and not just end up with a road-worn Matrix movie?
The closest we will ever come to an authentic Neuromancer adaptation is the movie Johnny Mnemonic.
Given the experience of the meh version of the Peripheral on Amazon and the uniquely literal visions proffered by Neuromancer, I imagine it will be difficult to bring the brilliant novel to a brilliant film.
What you are talking about is the visual experience. In my opinion, this will be mostly a problem BECAUSE the visuals have been there already. All of those movies following Blade Runner did their part of the Neuromancer-Cyberpunk thing.
However I consider the hardest part being the emotional depth of the characters which get their unique taste through the authors way to describe them. The Burroughesque touch and the unknowns is what makes Gibsons early works truly special (it gets easier with his latests works as we can see with the current adaptation of Peripheral). The show needs a true artists touch. It doesn't have to be what Gibson did but it should be something special, not mainstream.
Dune on the other hand is a straight forward dynasty drama at the beginning and only later escalates into a philosophical exercise later on before it explodes into something completely different towards the end (of the original books).
The beginning has been done already in Game of Thrones for example and is pretty much doable.
Neuromancer is harder but I think Apple can pull this off because I feel this brave approach from them. A feeling I had with Netflix at the beginning.
I think the only way to do Neuromancer justice is to recapture the camp yet earnest energy of the Johnny Mnemonic movie. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes.
> IIRC Gibson stated that Neuromancer is basically "un-movieable".
Honestly, I'd have to disagree. As far as novels go, it's actually fairly amenable to a film or TV adaptation -- the storyline is linear and follows a single main character with clear motivations, and the storytelling doesn't rely too heavily on internal monologue or implicit knowledge. It's perhaps a little too dense for a feature film, but as a TV series it'd be perfectly fine.
Some of the technical aspects of the story might make it more difficult to adapt -- like the scenes set in orbit, or in cyberspace -- but that's no longer the insurmountable obstacle it used to be. The Expanse had no problem realistically depicting scenes set in space, for example.
Funny what gets picked up. I'm not convinced Neuromancer is a good movie plot-wise, and it risks looking like a cheap Blade Runner clone.
Why can't someone adapt Consider Phlebas? The book is already an action/adventure movie and the drones would make great merch :)
Same, managed the first few episodes which were full of good ideas from Gibson, and then it meandered off into drivel. The adaptation of Neuromancer will be garbage, I plan on actively avoiding it.
The biggest obstacle stopping Neuromancer from being a viable TV show, IMO, is the lack of cohesion between chapters - readers are frequently dumped into the middle of entirely different circumstances than the previous chapter, just as they were maybe getting a grip on what was going on. And honestly, it kind of works! The pacing would be far too slow if characters stopped every five minutes to explain what was going on for the audience's sake. Hypothetically this could work in an episodic format, but will it be signed off on by conservative showrunners/execs? I'd guess no, but will remain cautiously optimistic.
I'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
I 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
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.
I 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.
A 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.
Neuromancer deserves it. Such an influential trilogy and yet no major film adaptations.
I’m actually super excited for this
Guessing here, but probably from William Gibson Neuromancer, where the term originates. You have the 1982 movie Bladerunner. And there is also the 80s blockbuster War Games, that deals with hacking.
These all had a big influence in the time of BBSes and microcomputers and the rise of the PC. In BBSes you had lots of discussions and books and software.
I couldn't even finish Snow Crash. The fact the protagonist's name was "Hiro Protagonist" is a good example of the intellectual tone of the novel. Every character reminded me of Poochy from The Simpsons, an over-written "edgy" anti-hero, as compelling as an episode of Saved By The Bell.
Neuromancer on the other hand I still think about, and I haven't read it in a decade.
And yet we still dont have a film! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer#Film
Thing is, who could even do such a book justice as a film?
I was in a bookshop in Germany the other day, and saw a "Neuromancer" cover with a cool stylized photograph of Seoul, South Korea, in the background. The most perfect metaphor for the West's present switch-over from Japanmania to the Korean Wave.
Similarly now have the modern Korean alphabet bleed into the neon signs of Cyberpunky streets of more recent movie productions where in the past you had Japanese or Chinese writing systems. The shifting representation of Asia in Western exoticism/escapism content is fascinating to observe.
Edit: Photo of the cover: https://eikehein.com/stuff/neuromancer_seoul.jpg
Attempted to get through Neuromancer, but (minor spoiler) when they started to switch persons around it got too confusing and I realized that it might have worked for a movie, but not a book. I also realized that I was only reading it because it was such a famous book, not because I was getting anything out of it, so I stopped.
Just putting this out in case anybody else feels the same pressure.
There is a very good radio play adaption of Neuromancer from the BBC : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo
The Neuromancer film was last meant to be directed by Tim Miller who directed Deadpool and was to be released in 2021.
So somehow the mess with the film rights may be resolved somehow.
The Neuromancer trilogy would make a great TV series. A few episodes for each book.
> Movie
The magic of Neuromancer is not just the story, it's in how its written.
An average sentence carries as much information and visuals as a whole paragraph in a more ordinary book. The data per character rate is absolutely insane, there's nothing quite like it. It's like reading a zip file. So fucking cool.
This aspect of the book will be next to impossible to capture in a movie... least you'd be expected to pause every few seconds to decipher what you see and what's going on.
So the chances for a movie adaptation that really groks the book are zero. But perhaps it's for the best.
I learned about Paolo Soleri from William Gibson's Count Zero (sequel to the much more well-known Neuromancer). Gibson always had a knack for foreseeing not just the automobile, but also the traffic jam:
> But today’s episode kept veering weirdly away from Michele’s frantically complex romantic entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed socioarchitectural descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for instance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, inhabited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend.
> Other segments of the jack-dream reminded him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated diagrams of the Projects’ interior structure, and droning lectures in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents. These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even less convincing than the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room. An entire wall opened onto a shallow balcony and a rectangle of cartoon-blue sky.
I think he missed wifi/cell phones, mostly. Had he thought of that, he would probably have explored these themes a bit more.
In Neuromancer there is an episode (second half, when they have already moved away from Earth surface) where a character is targeted by a sort of drone/service droid.
But I also sorta remember that in a subsequent story (I think it was Count Zero? Not sure anymore) one of the characters... cuts a videocall or something similar by actually yanking the cord out of the wall.
that is exactly what those of us simply waiting for a Neuromancer movie have been saying to ourselves for years :(
I'd rate the second book (broken angels) as one of my favourite sci-fi books (which might include tiger,Tiger/the stars my destination, neuromancer, fire upon the deep, holy Fire... There are many great ones).
I started with that one though, and then read the other two.
I'd say overall as a triology, it rates alongside neuromancer /the sprawl triology. A little more pulp - but a similar serious take on technological evolution.
[ed: the netflix series is to ac, a little like the Johnny Mnemonic film is to the short story. Although the series is a bit closer to the books]
Still waiting on a Neuromancer film or better yet, a mini-series.
I was also thrown off by this movie. I remember watching it in college. It seemed very disjointed, throwing around a bunch of dialogue, vocab, characters, politics, etc. at me that seemed badly translated and only poorly if ever explained or described. Sure, plenty of eye candy and then some somewhat intriguing AI stuff at the end. Recently, I tried watching a couple episodes of SAC, and while it was easier to follow, it felt again like I was only understanding about half the dialogue.
I am also told that it can be a little off-putting or disorienting to some because it is more concept-driven than plot-driven, which, in addition to being an awkward mashing together of the beginning and the end of the manga (manga wrangling seems in some form or other a common source of awkwardness in anime- e.g. Akira), is probably why it was hard for me to follow. To each his own, I suppose, but I think it's cool when you have both a well-told story AND intriguing concepts (e.g. Neuromancer, Gattaca, Blade Runner, etc.)
I just finished up watching almost all of Ghost in the Shell, from the original movie to Stand Alone Complex; I still need to re-watch Innocence. Originally I'd gotten into it back when I was a wee teen in the early/mid 2000s, and I hadn't completely understood the topics and commentary then. It was just cool action sequences with intriguing characters and an engaging story. All I can say now is, wow; the series is on-point. It's top tier sci-fi, up there with the likes of Neuromancer and Blade Runner. SAC is awesome and I liked it the most, since it has some really nice side episodes that expand on the world, like the one where the one Tachikoma's (a Tachikoma being this spider like mech with a nascent AI) neural net starts to develop beyond its parameters due to some "natural oils", but the whole series is amazing.
Just don't watch the original video animation things (OVA), which are basically two movies that each are amalgamations of Stand Alone Complex's two seasons. Not only is Batou's voice different, they don't do SAC any justice. Those things should be banned.
Neuromancer by William Gibson, as directed by Chris Cunningham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cunningham#Neuromancer
TV or film, really. The distinctions between the two have been greatly blurred these days, for better or for worse. Film, I suppose, is still considered a purer medium, though. Unfettered by commercial interruptions, and syndication or serialization concerns...
Yeah, it's a tossup if this works out or not.
I'm guessing this came about because Cornish had a movie that did quite well with the geek critics, if not the box office. So he probably got some meetings off that and they asked him what he wanted to do next. He said Snow Crash, they figured why not, it's just sitting there, and here we are. This is all conjecture on my part, but it seems likely.
Still, it's good to see it's floating to the surface again.
Now, if Neuromancer would ever actually happen...
EDIT: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura signed on to produce Neuromancer last month. That's a big deal, it might really get made. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pictures-announce-lorenzo-di-bonaventura-to-join-production-team-of-neuromancer-2012-04-30
The Road To Reality - Roger Penrose. Slowly, step by step.
Neuromancer - William Gibson. 6th or 7th time through. Coming to it now after having read Delany's Nova, and the influence is clear.
Little Heroes - Norman Spinrad. All that's good about Spinrad and all that's bad. He does write well about Hollywood.
History Of Film- David Parkinson. A short survey text, sort of a review for me.
I enjoy Stephenson's writing, and I think he must be a really smart guy. Which is why I'm puzzled by this reasoning:
1) Science and engineering aren't chasing anything audacious and world-changing anymore.
2) The blame lies partly with the fact that we're living in a world changed by pervasive, cheap communications and networking technology that would have seemed unthinkably audacious just a generation ago.
There is an irony here that I would have expected him to see through instantly, but he seems entirely oblivious to it.
Science fiction famously anticipated some real-world 20th century innovations like atomic power, communication satellites, waldos, etc. But it's had a much worse track record with communications. There are no cell phones (or cell-phone-like devices) in Neuromancer. Stephenson's own Snow Crash features an international computer network with a virtual-reality interface that seems incredibly cumbersome and inconvenient compared compared to the actual web.
I think it must be harder to imagine how any given piece of technology will interact with the larger society than it is to make predictions about what the development of a technology will make possible. A VR type interface to the web wouldn't be much of a challenge (technically) by now, but nobody wants one. Second Life is withering on the vine. The video telephone that has been so long predicted by SF is possible now, but it turns out to be more trouble than it's worth except in exceptional circumstances. And when you make it available to just anyone, it turns into a TV show about penises.
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.