But what most of us naively fail to remember in our enthusiasm is that this is rarely** about recreating the original or staying true to anything the original had at its core.
It’s about finding some source material that can be stretched into the optimum appeal to the widest possible audience for the maximum bucks at the most optimal ‘action per buck’/‘looks good on TV’, cost.
(** There are some honourable exceptions, but rarely where TV versions are involved - mostly the exceptions are film adaptations.)
This novel has been rumored to being planned or even in production as a movie just about every five years now. I have to say that Teller is better than previous rumors like Mark Wahlberg as Case. But the rumor fatigue leaves me completely skeptical and neutral. I’ll hopefully be happily surprised. The technology to depict it with high production quality is better than ever, so hopefully it will work out well. The writing and direction is probably the bigger concern.
Darn it, I’m not going to sign up for Apple TV just for this, so I’m going to miss it, if it’s any good. (Which absolutely remains to be seen. of course. Not sold on that main casting.)
Really? It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, but besides the lack of cellphones, it doesn’t seem like there’s that much that couldn’t be easily made futuristic (not counting the bits that reality has already caught up with). The big problem is that “cyberpunk” has been so uniformly visualized as just “Bladerunner,” with a dash of '90s technology, which is totally retrofuturistic at this point, but the books mostly aren’t written that way.
That’s the problem with the whole “cyberpunk aesthetic” that really had nothing to do with literary cyberpunk. It’s pretty easy to just ignore it all and come up with a design aesthetic that… isn’t that, and may actually be closer to the books.
If those are the expectations - I don’t know that people who read the book will have that expectation, as it doesn’t come out of the books. Granted, the thing about adaptations is that the audience mostly hasn’t read the book, so it’s a question of how many people haven’t read it but also are familiar with the cyberpunk cliché aesthetic, and expect it. Much of the book could be sold as a contemporary techno-thriller, which would be both appropriate and a familiar aesthetic for audiences.
I find the trick with cyberpunk is to ignore the trappings. Especially with William Gibson, it’s the people who matter. How they deal with how technology has made their lives different, and not so different from ours.
Drop the “cyberspace” as much as you can.
The real story is Case, and Molly, and Wintermute.
On another note, I really enjoyed The Peripheral as a series, since it worked hard to make the protagonists (and the antagonists) real people dealing with a world different from ours, without worrying too much about the tech beyond the fact that it was influencing how people live, how they think.
I think I might be alone in liking the AppleTV+ adaptation better than the books. Asimov broke ground, sure, but his cigar-chomping 1950’s vision of a world still casually sexist distracts too much from the plot, the idea of how Hari Seldon tried to steer civilization.
And I admit it, I loved the casting. Especially Lee Pace as the Brother Day version of Emperor Cleon. The deeper exploration of what role religion plays in guiding who we are, and where we are going. And I suspect the next season will see the Mule appear.
Neuromancer is additionally currently casting the female lead, Molly. They are looking for an actress in her 30’s or 40’s, who is physically fit. Molly is a mercenary, who was recruited by the same person as Case. The character is supposed to resemble Trinity from the Matrix films.
Way back in the 90s when I enjoyed the commercial failure called “Strange Days” (1995) and saw Angela Bassett playing the character ‘Mace’, I immediately thought “There’s the most convincing Molly I’ve seen, if the Neuromancer movie ever gets off the ground.”
I think Neuromancer isn’t “dated” because it described technology and systems that never existed (and probably never will). It’s basically a different universe than ours, much like Blade Runner’s world. If anything I think the Blue Ant trilogy seems more dated, as it is more realistic and clearly describes the tech world of the early 2000s.
