The 42-Year Journey to Bring 'Neuromancer' to the Screen

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.

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 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.

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'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'm along for 24 years, more than half.

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  re-read all  of  the Smoke  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.

Gibson is an absolute prophet. How did he know that four decades later memory chips will be like gold?

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.

I hope they find and hire whoever is to Neuromancer what Henry Cavill is to Warhammer, if they haven't already.

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)

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.

https://archive.ph/fYKqq

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.).

I hope it's really good.

Skipped the Foundation, will skip this too most likely.

I haven't been disappointed with the SF shows coming from Apple TV. Hopefully this is another great show.

This adaptation was always going to be difficult, as it's set in the "near future", but 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".

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.

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