Neuromancer: Classic or Dud

I know the first sentence of Neuromancer and never got much further.

Neuro: his schtick boiled down to "I have a fantastic job" and "I never get angry at people you know-nothing shit-for-brainses". Oh and starting new threads to reply to his own other threads. It pissed me off enormously at the time because that rap-rock thread was OK but in light of later happenings I may have been too harsh.

THE POSTER: Classic. I had a run-in with him on the rap vs. rock thread that got me really angry, to the verge of cursing him out. Because I had to control myself and think about what I was trying to say without going thermonuclear, he made me think about my arguments a little more and sound more intelligent. He's a contrary bastard who likes to rile people, but that's okay with me.

Margaritas with olives ?????????????????????????

the poster: what an irritating fucking dud. he made me want 2 kick his his head in, and i don't want 2 get that pissed 0ff about what some1 writes on a forum. at least mr. doompatrol could be interesting because he's such a headcase.

i haven't read the book.

Those who've read this, does it still stand up now?

Holds up as well as less than zero, and Bret Easton ellis has turned into a Wm Gibson character.

Yes xp

Read it recently for the second time after a gap of about 12 years, still a pretty great story.

Reading this now, for the first time, and it holds up really well. Solid noir, the futuristic bits don't have the weight of being seen as predictions (which probably makes it a better story, IMO).

I don't read much SF - is there a contemporary version of the recurring theme of worlds that are dark, polluted and ruled by Asian megacorps?

Bejing?

I don't think specifically Asian megacorps so much as rampant capitalism are at issue in these novels, but you might look at Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake, China Mieville's Bas-Lag fantasy novels, or (by reputation, at least) Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.

Wasn't there supposed to be a movie version of Neuromancer, directed by the guy who did those Aphex Twin videos? I remember seeing the site for it a few years ago... Whatever happened to that project?

Adaptation coming from Apple?

Can't imagine that 'the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel' will ever be a satisfying visual (especially because it's going to be some glossy Apple TV CGI bullshit).

A Neuromancer adaptation should be shot on Hi8 and only released via VHS, directed by someone who's never seen a movie not directed by John Carpenter or David Cronenberg.

i love that milo - kudos

wrote my college thesis on neuromancer so of course will watch show tho without high hopes - still never made it thru peripheral tho keep meaning to try - feel like the blue ant/bigend books would be best bet if they were trying to do a show

adapting neuromancer in 2024 means it's going to face the john carter of mars problem that it's been bastardised by so many other, lesser movies and books and videogames that it's going to struggle to capture what made it so groundbreaking and exciting in the first place

so either you modernise it somehow and risk losing the essential vibe of it or you go for the vibe and end up with something that looks like a million other things

milo's suggested approach is basically the only one i can imagine working and i can't imagine anyone would ever risk the value of the ip by doing anything so interesting with it

Great point, bizarro. Even when I read the book 20 years ago, I'd already seen and read so many things that pulled from it that I wasn't that impressed. And it'll be harder today

Like anything, it depends on the execution. There is plenty of cool imagery in the books that could good filmed.

That said, I kinda always thought Virtual Light was the one that might be more adaptable to tv. There is a bit more characterization in that one.

Yeah, just make it good. Space rastas could be awesome in the right hands; terrible in the wrong.

It’s his best book by a ways, still one of my favorite books by anyone. I’m OK if it’s never adapted.

I re-read a lot of Gibson through the pandemic and right-away what’s cool about Neuromancer is how great the writing is. This has to be my fourth or fifth time reading it and it’s still really fun. I think the full force of the Apple Studio battlestation will get a seriously impressive look and feel down that we’ll argue about in the future but miss that cool story. I can’t think of any series of theirs I’d repeat watch. milo & bizzaro otm

Obviously Molly cast right and with right look would be cool, but that part from Aeon Flux to all sorts of other things is one aspect that others have used if second hand.

How do you show the AI and when they “Jack” in to the system matrix (rename?) and have it look cool? A couple of other elements like the use of drones was spot on in the book.

It’s his best book by a ways, still one of my favorite books by anyone. I’m OK if it’s never adapted.

Agreed, but now I'm curious.

they made a hash out of the Peripheral, it started off promising and was well-cast but it went off the rails so fast

FWIW, different streamer, so we'll see. (The thing that has me...maybe less sanguine, maybe not about this adaptation is the separate news that Goyer stepped aside from showrunning Foundation for Apple, allegedly due to budget disputes. Given the visual richness and effects work on said series, if they're belt-tightening there and elsewhere that could mean less happening for this series in turn too, but on the flip side, going for something that ISN'T so sleek/effects heavy as noted above may actually be a strange plus!)

I think the real failure here is less the production company and more a general inability to really understand what makes a William Gibson novel work, I don't think the visuals are the difficult part.

I re-read a lot of Gibson through the pandemic and right-away what’s cool about _Neuromancer_ is how great the writing is. This has to be my fourth or fifth time reading it and it’s still really fun. I think the full force of the Apple Studio battlestation will get a seriously impressive look and feel down that we’ll argue about in the future but miss that cool story. I can’t think of any series of theirs I’d repeat watch. milo & bizzaro otm

If they used Burning Chrome as a prologue that would be amazing too, the descriptions of the matrix are better than in Neuromancer.

yeah hard-boiled is definitely a theme

Tried this just before the pandemic, and found it really, really hard to follow -- I think I gave up about sixty pages in. It's not you, it's me, Neuromancer.

For me the Chandler vibe is "meek author acts like tough guy" and maybe "seemingly plotless" but I do love Chandler so maybe that's an angle if I try to reread this.

Many XPs but the Blue Ant trilogy would be great, get it made by the people doing Slow Horses

Also, where this Snow Crash film we've been promised for aeons?

Neuromancer is definitely noir-with-80s-futurism-bolted-on. The writing is much more florid than anything else he'd ever do. It's pretty fascinating, actually, to see his style develop over the course of the first three novels — Count Zero is toned down from Neuromancer but he starts doing the multiple-narrators-whose-stories-eventually-converge thing which has become his trademark, and Mona Lisa Overdrive is so stripped-down, prose-wise, it's almost a screenplay.

Personally, I think the Blue Ant trilogy — Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History — are his best books. The Peripheral is good, but Agency is a real step down. I didn't like the Peripheral series much; it didn't match my vision of the books, so I'm glad the Neuromancer adaptation, whatever it turns out to be, is gonna be on Apple TV, because that guarantees I'll never see it and can just hang onto my (signed!) paperback and dip into it whenever the mood strikes.

Pattern Recognition is excellent. Haven’t read the rest of the trilogy.

Neuromancer definitely had a big Samuel Delany influence on the prose, that's for sure.

Well...here's something from it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJBnlZKgeUg

Basic summary via io9:

Neuromancer will run 10 episodes; it stars Callum Turner and follows “a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high-stakes crime with his partner Molly (played by Briana Middleton), a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets,” according to an Apple press release.

The rest of the cast includes Joseph Lee, Mark Strong, Cleménce Poésy, Peter Sarsgaard, Emma Laird, Dane DeHaan, André De Shields, Max Irons, and Marc Menchaca. It’s created for TV by Graham Roland (Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Dark Winds) and JD Dillard (Devotion, The Outsider, Sleight). Roland is the showrunner, Dillard is directing the pilot, and they’re both among the show’s executive producers.

Well...here's something from it:

📹

Well, they met their mandatory Sarsgaard quota, so that's a start, I guess.

Apple trying to corner the market on adaptations of SF books - Silo, Murderbot, Foundation. Maybe they can pick up Peripheral S2

wow what a compelling teaser clip, I'm hooked

I know, like your nephew's first 20 mins on Blender, doesn't bode well, the bar looks like any bierkeller.

The backlighting does not bode well for the accurate portrayal of the sky above the port. Also how does Ikoru tie into any of the visuals. Despicable

fuck this is gonna be bad

I’m trying for optimism here, but an adaptation is going to be rough work

Ignoring the Jack Ryan mention, it sounds like the producers worked on mid but somewhat idiosyncratic shows?

I think my bar is at “don’t be worse than Altered Carbon” which is pretty low

Cyperpunk or whatever was kind of a speculative thing during a time when very few of us were using personal computers on a daily basis; I wonder how this will translate, or if it'll be hella cringe

'Looks like we've hacked the mainframe! Let's reboot the disk and see if we can't tap into their modem'

'Are you kidding? We don't have enough gigs for that!'

'I said REBOOT!'

(obviously displaying my ignorance of william gibson which I barely dabbled in thirty years ago)

too clean

Still think the Blue Ant trilogy with the cinematography of Slow Horses would be the best case scenario for a Gibson adaptation.

The outsider was a bit better than mid.

I just want to see the scene of the dude injecting heroin while projecting a hologram of a scorpion stinging his arm

i know i shouldnt be but i am SO excited for this

i had mp3s of the audiobook version read by Gibson & it was like my favorite thing to listen to in the early 00’s

lets go to cyberspace baby

Agree with Elvis Telecom up there. I also reread a lot of Gibson during the pandemic. Probably inspired by the references in Buck-Tick and other Japanese cyberpunk bands. The writing is endlessly compelling. He's not really a tech writer at all. (Andy the Grasshopper being way off base in his description of the dialogue - Gibson had never even been 'online' when he wrote Neuromancer so that wasn't at all how his characters spoke.) He's an ideas writer. He takes concepts that were already existent, and extrapolates them to their conceptual endpoints.

I was surprised upon rereading, what in Neuromancer felt clunky and outdated (very little tbh, mainly the brief tech mentions, LOL Microsoft, how are they going to handle that in the film?) and what didn't. So many of the themes he raises are only just reaching their apotheosis now. My main memory is not the actual heist, but things like hyper-wealthy individuals bending technology to their whims (and being bent and made even more crooked by the technology they depend on.) People like Armitage and the Dixie Flatline who had been absolutely used, wrecked and discarded by corporations and governments (which amounted to the same thing).

What's great about Gibson is how little of the tech he actually explains. He explains details in character, how the people in those future worlds would view them, what they would notice. What was brilliant about the book of The Peripheral was how *little* was explained about The Jackpot, we knew it was something bad, but not knowing the details of e.g. how the Klept took over was much more scary and evocative. That was a big thing that the television series got wrong - it overexplained things that were left to the imagination in the book. The series nailed down and therefore closed off ideas which were left open and therefore far more imaginative in the book.

I do wonder in this adaptation if they will attempt to correct the (few) mistakes and bring the tech up to date. Or if they will leave it more retro-futurist. I actually think it would be cooler if it were left more retro-futurist, and leaned heavily into that 80s neon Omni Magazine vision of the future. The clip is too short to tell. But it looks somehow wrong. Not enough dirt. The sky too bright. It's the characters that make Gibson so Gibson-y so a run-through of a set is not going to tell you anything.

I'm just not sure I want to see this novel set down like this. My enjoyment of the story was that it floated around in my mind in a surreal form, almost abstract like due to Gibsons way of describing stuff. But that's just me, maybe it will be an enjoyable series. I'll watch it if the feedback encourages me to.