Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen? | Hacker News Reader

Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?

j-nelson.net

31 pointsemigre68 comments

A film adaptation of Neuromancer loses my favorite part of it, the writing. The most famous part of the book is its opening line: 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.' It feels more like reading verse than prose, and it's worth it to read it just for that.

Take that away and what is left? It's published far back enough that unique elements of its plot should already be familiar to audiences from its imitators. The characters to me are not very memorable (maybe Wintergreen is). Gibson found that Blade Runner looked exactly like what he had in mind for Neuromancer. There's no meat to the book without it being a book.

> Wintergreen

Wintermute :)

There is a street in my town with this name. I've been tempted to steal the streetsign!

Oops! Less memorable than I thought. Its concept is, at least: it's close to being the villain of the story, Case its hapless pawn, yet it's also a captive. There are some parts of the plot I do like, even if it's not a draw as a whole.

The language in Neuromancer was almost impenetrable to me. You just have to accept it and let it wash over you, which creates a unique effect (practically literally, since everyone will have slightly different associations with the neo words). But the result is that the words are less memorable. What sticks are words that we know and somehow are half-associated. In retrospect, the book also teaches a thing about memory.

I had to read it three times before I recognized there was actually a plot.

I agree. Gibsons writing style is incredible and worth every syllable, but I find his stories to be lacking. Every word is a morsel that doesn't diminish with time and is best when it's savored.

I LOVE reading his works, but I'm not a fan of his books.

I agree. I often wish people would just read the book instead of waiting for a movie adaptation to legitimize it or elevate it to a more prestigious form.

Interestingly there have been two major technological shifts since that was written; the metaphor has shifted from a static grey, to a vibrant blue, to a solid black.

One of the things I like about Gibson is that he'll spend a great deal of time talking about some technology whether it's mundane or fantastic from the perspective of the frustrated user of that tech. He'll do this early in the book so that later on when that technology comes into play, he doesn't need a segue to explain it.

True, Gibson's writing is very unique. One of the things I like is how the reader is often left in the dark about details and can slowly understand the world the story takes place in. That part actually ports to the screen quite well. There's nothing worse than clunky dialog that explains the exposition narrative of a novel. I noticed that I enjoyed the Peripheral quite a bit in that way. Although they changed the story a great deal it has the same feeling.

I see what you mean. With Foundation, also in Apple TV+, I felt that the adaptation to television didn’t work — at least for my taste. I think that it was just a tricky book to adapt to another medium. I think Neuromancer has the potential to fail in a similar way (sadly!). But we’ll have to see how it goes!… :)

i have a lot of doubts they can depict filming the hacking in a way that doesn’t feel like exploring the file system in jurassic park

But isn't that how Gibsonian hacking works? Projecting into virtual dataspaces and all that.

Um, this sounds like a perfectly enjoyable opening scene.

OPENING SCENE

EXT: Day(?), above a port. The sky is the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel

(I picture that either as a sort of uniform gray, or actually pixellated static. Just lighten up the sky in the opening scene of Blade Runner)

The main reason I don't want to see it is I can already "see" the whole movie in my head (because I scripted it when I read the book as a kid) and I know they're going to get all the details wrong.

Not quite the point. The rest of the book's text has that same fever-dream inventiveness, and you can't just have the book narrated to an audience. All of the book's style is lost or altered in the new medium.

The movie version of that line is a captivating opening screen. I'm afraid The Matrix stole its thunder, however, with its Warner Brothers logo in sapphire/terminal green with the flickering grey cloud background.

In fact, a lot of Neuromancer's elements were successfully implemented in The Matrix (crapsack protagonist helped towards his destiny by kick-ass ninja girl. Heist team that gets whittled down. rasta side-characters... Hell, even Morpheus drooling as he's being tortured by the Agents reminds me of Armitage breaking down) so I don't know how Neuromancer can transition to the screen without feeling too much like a rehash of The Matrix.

Arguably, Inception was even closer to Neuromancer. They were both about a washed up hacker who is recruited to do one last job who first has to assemble a crew to do it. And they both end up dealing with a simulation of their former lover at the end! And in a ruined city! Yes, it was dream hacking in Inception but that was the only major difference.

Nice, I never made the connection! Inception is so tonally different to how I felt Neuromancer.

Inception is pretty much an analog cyberpunk story. Its themes are of simulated realities, induced hallucinations, questioning perception, the sort of stuff that goes back to Philip K. Dick proto-cyberpunk. Its trappings are of shadowy megacorporations (one is named Cobol Engineering!), heists undertaken by specialized teams of gun-toting fashionistas, malignant anomalies with minds of their own.

Since first reading it, that first line has become one of the cornerstone's of how I evaluate new books - it doesn't bode well if an author didn't take the time to set the tone of the book with the first line.

There's also the pervasive argument across Gibson's work that humanity is speciating, the ultra-rich becoming a different kind of human that's hard to convey just visually.

The corporation becoming a gestalt, I don't know, it's difficult to adapt to the big screen, maybe a series, but we've seen what they did to "The Peripheral"

I'm going to be Pollyanna and say that we might be at the cusp of a golden age of sci-fi adaptations. For decades people said that Dune was unfilmable and then Villeneuve went and done it and made it look easy, even conventional. (I actually have some additional thoughts on that- it could have been a little bit longer for greater exposition and characterization, and more weird.) So this should mean that any classic work of sci-fi should get some consideration. We're at a time in the industry where both visual effects and audiences (with the mainstreaming of nerd culture) are ready for such media.

That's not to say these adaptations will be good, but they're certainly filmable. Neuromancer gets a lot of cachet, but other IPs have been attempted already. Villeneuve successfully made a good Blade Runner sequel. Live-action Ghost in the Shell happened- it was execrable and wrapped up in controversy, but it still got made and the neon-soaked setting looked decent. They made a fourth Matrix. Stepping away from cyberpunk, Childhood's End got a miniseries. The Expanse got a full show.

So I doubt that there's anything inherently more difficult about Gibson's novels. If anything, the popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 and its Edgerunners anime has primed the public for '80s retrofuturistic cyberpunk, so they can choose to adapt this as a period piece if they wanted to, without "modernizing" its futuristic conceits. No need to add smartphones.

Call me when they start adapting John Brunner '60s new wave sci-fi. Now that would be a hard sell.

Tbh I thought David Lynchs Dune captured the oddity of the universe, the cruelty of the universe, and did it's own stuff as well. I know not everyone likes it, but I think it has it's place, especially in the context of all his other movies and tv shows.

I strongly agree with you. Dune is weird, insular, looped back on itself, and has had thousands of years to do so. They've switched from one "sin" (making a machine in the likeness of the human mind) to another (thou shalt not deform the soul, by the creation of ultraspecialized humans such as Mentats). It's a nasty, paranoid place (the voice-overs helped with that), wherein you constantly had to think about how others would think, and on.

The Weirding Way is essentially something that cannot be filmed (you would have to invent a martial art that looked unique, spectacular on screen, and was somehow wildly effective), and so it became the Weirding Modules, and that worked, too. Herbert like the "third stage" Guild Navigator idea so much he incorporated it into his later works.

This later effort left me cold.

I found the new Dune to be solid but somewhat slavishly faithful, which prevented it from interesting innovations. And the visuals themselves, with the austere grey granite cyclopean edifices, were interesting but nothing we haven't seen before- Ridley Scott's questionable Prometheus really pioneered that art direction for sci-fi. It really could've used a better visual palette and color editing. Also now they're starting to stick Mongolian throat singing everywhere (it shows up a bit in Wakanda Forever) so we only have Dune to blame if it becomes overused.

The new Dune does what villeneuve does in all his films. Like go watch Arrival or Bladerunner 2049, they all have this big sweeping shots, every frame is a painting. Villeneuve sees films as a way to capture the visual feeling of something being bigger then you. All his films do this. In Bladerunner 2049 Villeneuve literally has the hologram girl as a giant hologram that Ryan Gosling's character encounters when he is deciding whether he exists as a person or not. She stands there demonstrating that the world has digitized and moved away from humanity so far that whatever humanness is left is whatever you decide for yourself. The best part of this movie I thought was that then this relationship between Ryan Gosling and the hologram girl becomes the most human relationship in the film. Because they chose it to be that way. Even though neither one is actually human.

Oh, I totally agree. (The austere grandeur also reminds me of Christopher Nolan's work, too). I just think in Dune he's reusing a good amount of his past visual language. Some of the ships look a lot like the Heptapod vessels from Arrival. The part when Arrakeen is on fire reminded me of the fighting in Sicario after the Juarez mob boss is arrested. Wish he had invented more novel elements, and again, more varied use of color.

Your points about the giant Joi hologram in 2049 are valid. I wish he had done just a bit more of that. (That scene, with its neon blues and purples, was also distinct from the usually grey Prometheus palette that Dune dipped into too much imo.) Personally I felt a lot of the desert scenes looked a little artificial, maybe it was the color grading or lack of scale. The best desert scene imo is the second sandworm encounter where the rock mouse establishes the scale.

The thing the new movie did was capture the cruelty of the haves and havenots and the cheapness of life in Dune. Dune is a universe where a tiny select group of people matter and everyone else exists in their servitude. Not even as people, but as currency. The scene where they murder people to take their blood so that the Sardukur have war paint in the new movie perfectly captures this. They don't even dwell on what they are doing, it's just there in the background. This is a major theme in the book and what the Freemen fight against and live a life that recognizes each life as sacred. They do this by essentially subjecting themselves to a desert environment that actively tries to kill them every second. This visceral experience makes each life precious.

> Tbh I thought David Lynchs Dune captured the oddity of the universe

What I liked about Lynch's version is hold old everything felt. The Empire was around for a long time and so had become mostly ossified and decadent (which the Golden Path was/is meant to rectify), and you could tell that by the clothes people wore and many of the sets (e.g., the room where the Navigator and Emperor meet).

The Sci-Fi miniseries hewed closer to the story, but everything felt too 'shiny' (no doubt due to budget constraints).

Villeneuve wasn't as old looking as Lynch, but not as shiny as Sci-fi, but somewhere in the middle. The costumes were also pretty good.

I also appreciated Zimmer's 'alien sounding' musical score, and the way it blended in with the sound design many times (the teams ended up working together a lot instead of being strictly siloed like often happens).

>Tbh I thought David Lynchs Dune captured the oddity of the universe, the cruelty of the universe, and did it's own stuff as well.

Wait till you hear about Jodorowsky's Dune[1][2], the best film never made.

With Pink Floyd doing the soundtrack, H.R. Giger doing the visuals, Jean "Moebius" Geiraud creating the story board, Dan O'Bannon on VFX, and Salvador Dali agreeing to play the Emperor, you'd get a lot to say about the oddity and cruelty of that universe.

...had anyone had the guts to actually fund Jodorowsky on that one. Alas, after assembling the all-star team, doing the pre-production, securing the rights, and being ready to go, he simply didn't get the funding to implement his vision.

Giger, who hasn't been involved with film till that point, went on to make Alien with O'Bannon; and the project - despite never been made! - has influenced all subsequent space sagas.

The documentary about it[3] is fascinating.

[1]https://www.jodorowskysdune.com/

[2]https://www.openculture.com/2016/10/14-hour-epic-film-dune-t...

[3]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/

I am anti-jodorowsky because he raped a woman, talked about how it was super important to the artistic integrity of the movie, then when people started having problems with that kind of thing, said he was just saying all that stuff to get the movie noticed because hollywood hates mexican cinema. so i don't really mourn that he didn't get to make a dune movie.

That's really terrible. Now I'm wondering what '70s director would have been a good fit to replace him, while preserving the all-star cast of Welles, Jagger, Dali, etc. The comedy option would be if George Lucas tried psychedelics and took the gig instead of making Star Wars.

See my other comment.

TL;DR: we have as much basis to believe he raped anyone as we have to believe thart he literally raped Frank Herbert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKjpH2qO8XY

That's to say, nothing aside from some words he said to promote his film, and later retracted.

>I am anti-jodorowsky because he raped a woman

That's a fact?

My understanding is that the only source for that were his own remakrs in an interview, and that he later retracted them[1].

No other person ever claimed anything of the sort about him, there's no track record of assault, and there is no indication that he would be the kind of person to do that.

In the very remakrs held against him, he said:

>When I wanted to do the rape scene, I explained to [Mara Lorenzio] that I was going to hit her and rape her. There was no emotional relationship between us, because I had put a clause in all the women's contracts stating that they would not make love with the director. We had never talked to each other. I knew nothing about her. We went to the desert with two other people: the photographer and a technician. No one else. I said, 'I'm not going to rehearse. There will be only one take because it will be impossible to repeat. Roll the cameras only when I signal you to.' Then I told her, 'Pain does not hurt. Hit me.' And she hit me. I said, 'Harder.' And she started to hit me very hard, hard enough to break a rib...I ached for a week. After she had hit me long enough and hard enough to tire her, I said, 'Now it's my turn. Roll the cameras.' And I really...I really...I really raped her. And she screamed. "

To me, that sounds like the actress was there with consent.

Finally, this is a person for whom English is not a native language, and who uses the word "rape" quite loosely.

For example, he said he "raped Frank Herbert... but with love"[2].

I would say, there really isn't enough basis to conclude that his statements about "rape" meant anything but artistic exaggeration.

[1]https://www.artforum.com/news/alejandro-jodorowsky-speaks-ou...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKjpH2qO8XY

Honestly? I hope not. If a true visionary were to direct it, Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott in their prime, or Denis Villeneuve, who seems to be able to do impossible things — maybe. Otherwise I’d expect it to be as dull and forgettable as most movies made from PKD sources — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_b...

I saw William Gibson read at Powell’s years ago, maybe around the Virtual Light era. Someone asked him about Johnny Mnemonic, about why Molly Millions wasn’t in it. He said something like, “I thought they were going to fuck up the movie, and if I’d let them write Molly into it then the studio would own her and I’d never be able to have her in a better movie.”

So I’d hope that Gibson is involved in this, and has higher expectations or involvement than before.

I have 0 hope, given the people involved.

>Graham Roland will serve as a writer, producer, and showrunner of Neuromancer. He is best known for his work on the hit show Lost and Amazon Prime Video’s Jack Ryan. Author William Gibson will also serve as an executive producer. We can also reveal that at least one episode will be directed by J.D. Dillard. His newest film, Devotion, based on a true story war drama starring Jonathan Majors (Lovecraft Country) and Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) is currently playing in theaters. Besides that, he is best known for his work on The Outsider.

[0]https://www.theilluminerdi.com/2022/11/29/neuromancer-eyes-m...

Roland only wrote for the last (sixth) season of Lost.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221203202712/https://j-nelson....

It’s only a matter of time before Snow Crash finally follows in suit...

I'm surprised that Snow Crash hasn't been adapted yet. As others commented, most of Neuromancer's plot has become recycled by what came after. But Snow Crash is to cyberpunk what The Boys is to superhero movies: a satirical take on corporate America. This should be especially popular at our current moment with the impending collapse of Meta's Verse (I refuse to let them own "metaverse")

>I'm surprised that Snow Crash hasn't been adapted yet

It's because there's a pedo rape scene in the book that's central to the plot, and the book itself doesn't disapprove of it in any way.

Neither do Neal Stephenson's fans, apparently[1].

The extra creepy factor is that the pedo rape scene is written by the (then) 33-year-old man from the perspective of the 15-year-old girl who doesn't see it as bad thing.

I loved the book, but I wish ol' Neal did a second edition with someone giving adults lasting after the 15-year-old in the book as little as look disapproval to hint that, maybe, sexualizing 15 year olds is as bad as glorifying corporations.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/nealstephenson/comments/gua46b/am_i...

Interesting that the blog author dreads a serial adaptation. If anything I would dread a movie adaptation as the limited time and the pacing requirements make it difficult to avoid rushing through the story and skipping much of the worldbuilding.

They use Foundation as an example of why serialized adaptations are poor, but this understates the difficulty of the task in adopting a set of short stories that sprawl over worlds and eras, featuring complex ideas. I have a hard time believing a movie format could do a superior job with Foundation.

For the Foundation, you really need the extra hours to chronicle an epic future historical drama with a lot of psychological themes and political intrigue. I'd have to say I'm rather worried about the upcoming Hyperion adaptation from Bradley Cooper for similar reasons, it was to be a show but now it's going to be a movie.

Game of Thrones is an example of why serialized adaptations can be great.

Apparently (I haven't seen it for myself, but all the reviews suck), Foundation is simply not such an example. This doesn't mean serialized adaptations don't work. Similarly, I can find lots of examples of movie adaptations that suck; this doesn't mean movie adaptations can't work.

Out of the sprawl trilogy, I'd say Mona Lisa Overdrive would probably make the better "movie". Unfortunately, Molly is difficult character to use as the common thread. Don't get me wrong, I love Molly as a character and she is perfect to connect the books, but I cannot see using her ambivalence to the world as the connective tissue between "movies". And if we're mentioning sci-fi books that should be turned into movies, Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age is high on my list.

I think parts of Diamond Age could look absolutely brilliant in a Hollywood film.

But I cannot imagine how you would include the Hackworth/Alchemist/Drummer concepts.

Damn I have to read that book again.

I went looking for a comment I remembered posting on a previous occasion of an impending Neuromancer adaptation, and found the story from 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565734

I think it still holds up 11 years later:

> It's almost certainly too much to hope for, but my impossible dream is that this gets done up like it's the 1980s with circa-2012 CGI. A bold kind of retrofuturism we haven't seen yet in film.

> Thing is, you can't take Neuromancer out of the '80s. The newness of computer networks, the ascendancy of Japan, the aesthetics of computer hardware -- boxy, whirring things with stark, green CRTs spewing masses of indecipherable alphanumeric incantations, big clunky cables, heavy briefcase-size mobile units; it's all there. And the mash-up of digital and analog technologies is no less integral than Gibson's opening lines to the book, comparing a halogen-hazed night sky to the analog noise of TV transmission.

> Neuromancer didn't arrive into a world comfortable with computer technology like ours today. The book stands as a fantastic trip back into a time when technology could be dark, dangerous, and foreign, a zeitgeist Gibson leverages to dazzling effect. "Updating" Neuromancer would bring its entire shadowy world out into the unthreatening, mid-day sun.

They could if they were imaginative enough to project current tech into a similarly dangerous future. It's been said that sci-fi is the easiest to date form of film. Our image of the future is so strongly tied to the moment itself.

I've always wanted to do a Neuromancer adaptation that uses modern film and CG tech but is shot with the aesthetic and general tech level of 1984 - everybody smokes, you don't take out the USSR refs, period music, lots of Ridley Scott dry ice, the works.

Except the theme song is Lali Puna's cover of "Together In Electric Dreams", because it is perfect. https://youtu.be/MjnpCd7sAqI

I hope not. Neuromancer is one of those properties that's so influential on the cyberpunk genre and which is such a product of its time (what with the mainframes and cassette tapes and "cyberspace" completely devoid of the internet and internet culture) that the more faithful an adaptation is, the more derivative and dated it would appear... and ironically more banal, since the real world has become more cyberpunk than cyberpunk in many ways. Gibson himself feared it was obsolete when he saw Blade Runner before he had even finished the manuscript for Neuromancer. Few of its themes really resonate with our modern technological surveillance dystopia, simply because it predates them all, and those which do I fear have been outdone since. I mean, its iconic opening line no longer even makes sense in a world that's moved on from cathode ray tubes and static. It's a future that still has pay phones.

Metropolis is entering the public domain on January 1. I find the potential of that far more interesting than an adaptation of Neuromancer. Or better, instead of Neuromancer, adapt one of Gibson's more modern properties.

I have really enjoyed The Peripheral and found it to be a nice accompaniment to the books. Sprawl would be sick.

Yeah, The Peripheral is quite good. Gibson seems pretty happy with the adaptation too, which is a good sign. I still haven't read the books.

The Sprawl trilogy was one of my favourite series when I was young. I'd like to see it adapted so that it had the same "dent in the universe" effect it had when it was published.

The thing with The Peripheral adaptation: there’s basically no cyberpunk aesthetic in it. The near-future stuff is done very naturalistically. The content remains pure Gibson.

to be fair, there's not much in the book, either.

You do know that Gibson stopped being cyberpunk decades ago, right? Mainly because many of the shitty aspects of cyberpunk are just "reality" nowadays?

I found the pacing on the show to be way too fast but I enjoyed it. Television and movies in general are afraid of moving slowly now-a-days. I think this is a big problem for most book-to-screen adaptations.

I started watching, because I was lazy and Prime recommended it, and stopped after about 20 minutes in. My impression in that time was "Rebel teenage girl outsmarts everyone in overdone and ugly CGI but we've added something about neuro to make it look sci-fi". It felt like the Hunger Games, but less realistic. I did not know at the time it was written by Gibson, who I admire as an author, but also it did not come to my mind that it could have possibly been written by him. Is the screen adaptation so different from the book, or did they add filler to make 8 (or more?) episodes?

Nah, keep going. At least watch the first episode through.

It would have been great if the tv adaptation did not stray so far from the book in later episodes.

Scenes from our favorite books often get left on the cutting room floor. Personally, I hope they don't only nail the flechette-ridden action scenes but also some of the quieter and more poetic ones, like when Case wakes up in the loft and is able to use the matrix again. Getting his fix again after being on the wagon for so long.

“And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”

I don't really need Neuromancer to be a movie. I'd rather they make a new cyberpunk story that is just as stylish and creative. Something that will influence the next 30 years. I know there are people in the world who have the talent to do that, and would like to do it. I bet they're all working on licensed IP right now though, since that's where the work is. I guess we get the culture we pay for.

They should try to pull off something the way Blade Runner did 40 years ago. Blade Runner was allegedly an adaptation of a PKD story, but in reality it barely resembled the source material, and just took some inspiration and the basic premise from it.

Then again, Blade Runner was a flop at the time... But these days with streaming services targeting more niche audiences, maybe it could be done better. Just look at the success of "The Expanse". It didn't treat the viewers as complete idiots.

It's very easy to ruin Neuromancer in an adaptation.

I'm kind of skeptic after seeing the adaptation of "The Peripheral", which IMHO misses the most important parts (and characters) of the book and waters it down into an action series. All the social criticism gets diluted.

On the other hand, somebody adapted "The Expanse" brilliantly, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

I think the The Expanse's TV adaptation turned out so well thanks in large part to the involvement of the original authors as writers and producers on the show.

I'd pony up for apple tv in a split second for this if they make it. Must read if you're into sci fi with AI and cyberpunk themes.

This is one of my favorite novels so I hope so. Hell, I'd even settle for the other two sprawl books.

Needs to be the whole trilogy.

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