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Comment by shadowofneptune | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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!… :)

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.

> Wintergreen

Wintermute :)

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.

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

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