If you can get a free month I highly recommend Severance. Very good
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It’s dated. The entire premise is dated and the view of cyberspace looks a bit ridiculous today.
The Blue Ant trilogy isn’t dated because it’s more about people and relationships. And the concept of a flawed billionaire trying to take over the world seems as current as one can get. And was set slightly in the future from 2010. Today.
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I think that the market is good for a smart show about AI, which this can really lean into. I think The Sprawl setting and stories could be well adapted. The technology in Neuromancer is still not available, so ignore any dates, make up a reason for a Japanese resurgence (heck, not even hard - just assign them the invention of some critical technologies that allowed them to become ascendant again or just drop all the japaniphilia?)
If you look at the headlines today there is a lot of AI, a lot of Metaverse, and Elon is going to start executing people by shooting quarters into their brains (apparently the only thing Neurolink has done is improve/automate the installation, the tech they are shoving in is not really new or great).
I can see why it would make sense to try this now. I am actually not hoping for a faithful adaptation - I want something that, like all good SF, comments on our world today…and there is a lot that a refresh of the story could do while still keeping the things that made Neuromancer great.
I hope that happens
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Here you go!
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He would actually be perfect if he wasn’t so damn good at being Jesse Pinkman. My brain would be reminding me it’s Jesse every 2 minutes.
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I still think the Neuromancer take on cyberspace (a sort of immersive interface for hackers to visualize and manipulate data) has held up better than the Snow Crash take on cyberspace (basically something between “Second Life” and whatever Zuckerberg has been spending all those billions on, except inexplicably popular).
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Believe it or not Aaron Paul is 43 now. That’s why they had to shoot his recent cameo in the final season of Better Call Saul obscured in darkness to help hide how much he’d aged since the start of Breaking Bad.
I could totally see him as Case though. No reason the screen version has to keep his character exactly the same age he was in the book.
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Breaking Bad, but with hacking, is probably the right way to do William Gibson
… oh wait, they did that already, that was Mr. Robot
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Also MUDs, which were big in 1992. A lot of younger people think Neal Stephenson was a visionary on par with Gibson but what they don’t get is that Stephenson personally experienced the early Internet of the early 1990s and simply did the normal SF writer thing of imagining what this sort of thing could lead to (plus he had obviously read Gibson, Sterling, and other earlier cyberpunk authors). Gibson wrote his stuff never having used ARPANET, PLATO, or any of the other early networks available in 1984. And on a typewriter (although that wasn’t all that unusual in the 1980s although much has been made of that fact since).
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That’s my game plan with “John Carter.” Adored all of the books growing up, so if I don’t see the movie, it can’t be ruined.
(To be fair, people have told me the film is not that bad. Just lousy marketing. Still too chicken to watch it, though. )
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I agree, and even then, the cyberspace was left as vague as possible. It’s the stuff in meatspace that is mostly interesting, the director could even get away with not showing cyberspace at all. Nothing in the story actually depended on visualizing cyberspace, not even the final icebreaker. It is the exploration of what is life, what is sentience that matters.
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I don’t know why sentient AI’s would feel it necessary to develop visual representations of themselves and their data. To make it easier for humans to hack them? Seems like they wouldn’t have a need or interest.
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The film is great!
But it does leave you wanting more, knowing it’ll never come.
There’s a lot of spectacular set pieces, with John’s assault on the sky barges being a particular highlight that raises the hairs on my neck every time I watch it.
I found out about it here, but the book “John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood” is a superb breakdown of what went wrong.
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In the books you can sort of think of ‘cyberspace’ as a very fancy 3D file/server browser (as written by someone who, at that point, had never used a computer). So the AI were only visible there* as much as a corporation’s servers might be.
In terms of how they represented themselves to humans, Neuromancer only spoke via voice IIRC, and Wintermute spoke through the faces of the dead.
*(To quote from the books, “There’s no there, there.”)
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I guess I could. If I were so inclined. And if it made any sense.
It is great, if you skip the opening scene
Seriously, if you’ve never seen John Carter of Mars start the movie 10 mins in and it’s great. The cold open on Mars I am certain was a clueless executive’s mandate and it completely ruins the pacing and storytelling.
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I reread all those last year, and they come across as charmingly quaint in a lot of ways too, depressingly. Still superb though.
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