Done right I think Neuromancer could be an excellent series. But it would be so easy to do it wrong, dear god.
Side note, I once encountered William Gibson on a street. I was carrying my toddler on my shoulders along Commercial Drive in Vancouver and saw him about 20 paces ahead.
I recognized him, and at the same time I saw him realize that I was recognizing him. He immediately took about 4 large steps off the sidewalk to avoid any awkward fan interaction. Fair enough, one does not become a semi-reclusive author for the fame and attention. I gave him a smile and kept walking. That is probably my best celebrity encounter ever (not that I’ve had many).
Gonna see who has the balls to pull of “The Difference Engine” on the little screen… Gibson and Stirling do Steampunk, in the best way. I hope this one hits. Many niche shows of this genre get a single Season then die on the vine because their corporate overlords can’t see the value in having more material and a complete store to resell for YEARS. Instead making dead shows noone watches at all. Looking at you Heroes and Lost. End them properly.
Neuromancer is the palimpsest for so many films from the ‘90s!
Not to mention later films like Inception – I mean, a washed up hacker gets recruited by a shady guy to do “one more job”. To do so, he needs to assemble a team. And in the end he ends up having to deal with a simulation of his dead wife/girlfriend whose death the protagonist blames on himself. And the encounter takes place in a simulation of a ruined city!
I just mean that the technological background of the three series converges with the present day. We still don’t have cyberspace and AI 40 years after Neuromancer, but we have Google Glass which was released only 20 years after Virtual Light, and Pattern Recognition with its marketing influencers was to me set practically contemporaneously. (I was working in Soho at the time, and walked the same streets as the characters.)
So in some sense Gibson has moved from being an SF author to a commentator on current society.
Yeah, Snow Crash is pure dopamine. I can’t think of another time when I’ve read a book while feeling like I was playing a video game.
I don’t think that there’s much point in comparing the two, though. Aside from the setting, the two books could hardly be more different. It’s like comparing 1984 with Catch-22.
I’m not going to be answering many questions here, about Apple TV’s adaptation of Neuromancer. I’ll have to be answering too many elsewhere, and doing my part on the production. So I thought I’d try to describe that, my part.
I answer showrunner’s and director’s questions about the source material. I read drafts and make suggestions. And that’s it, really, though my previous experience has been that that winds up being quite a lot of work in itself.
I don’t have veto power. The showrunner and director do, because the adaptation’s their creation, not mine. A novel is a solitary creation. An adaptation is a fundamentally collaborative creation, so first of all isn’t going to “be the book”.
Particularly not the one you saw behind your forehead when you read the book, because that one is yours alone. So for now let’s leave it at that.
I remember when I found Parable of the Sower - an oddly sorta damaged copy at a book fair in central virginia, sometime in the mid 1990s. It just looked cool, as I didn’t know the author at the time. Reading was an awakening. I’ve been periodically rereading it since, finding something fabulous every time. I find the novel astounding - the craftsmanship, the care, the power, the messages, the ability to hold strong for years and across so many rereads.
I am jealouse that you are experiencing it for the first time. I hope you find the wonder and excitement and depth that I have enjoyed.
When I first excitedly saw the movie in the theater, my thoughts as I saw William Gibson’s name in the closing credits as screenwriter was, basically, “Well, if this is where he wanted to go with his story, who am I to say he’s wrong?”.
Then years later I heard a radio story about the importance of foreign money in Hollywood that included a segment with Gibson about the film.
The original idea was a short (20-30 minute) black-and-white art film featuring Molly’s dance on the Killing Floor. It was budgeted for something like between 2-3 million dollars. But when they went to get it financed, there was no takers. However, if they did it full length, in color, with lots of action sequences, and with Dolph Lungren, they could get all the money they needed to do that.
Also, Molly was tied up in the movie rights (long sold) to a Neuromancer movie, so they couldn’t use her and had to replace her with a new character.
It turned a great story with lots of visual impact into…that.
I suspect that part of the reason that Snow Crash and (even more so) The Diamond Age read like parodies of Gibson’s work is that they are some of the first post-cyberpunk work. They take the tropes of cyberpunk and turn them on their heads or make fun of them or respond to them.
One thing that makes this apparent is the character of Bud in the beginning of diamond age, who is an archetypal cyberpunk protagonist in that he’s a petty criminal who gets by by doing crime with his cyber implants and dresses in black leather and mirror shades. He gets convicted and sentenced to death in the first chapter of the book, signalling that that kind of character is over, and, in a way, obsolete. The fictional universe is no longer a good habitat for his type.
I’ve been assured by the finest minds on Twitter that SF only became a commentaty on current society when they had women and black people as protagonists.
(but coincidentally, any SF that has women and black protagonists from before they were radicalised online is OK because reasons)
I have a weak visual imagination. Gibson wrote so vividly that I briefly closed my eyes from reading and could see the matrix before me.
I was fortunate enough to start Fantasy with Tolkein. Coming back to it I keep seeing overdone tropes. Tropes that he laid down. Though I’ve maybe got enough Old Norse and Anglo Saxon literature under my belt to appreciate what he was paying homage to.
Oh definitely.
And @Mindysan33 's point: that “I want room service” line.
And the line “It’s a fish”:
There’s a lot of weird choices made in the making of that movie, its final edit, etc.
I have a kind of archival, historian-of-the-internet’s appreciation for book. And in some ways, the movie, which was very much of its time. The budget for set design and construction must have been insane.
It very much is a parody of Gibson (and cyberpunk in general). Your comment on Spaceballs is apt because due to the later fame of Stephenson many younger readers are introduced to the whole concept of cyberpunk by reading Snow Crash and don’t get that Stephenson is being satirical about the genre.
