Apple is turning William Gibson's Neuromancer into a TV series
theverge.com
theverge.com
Enjoyed LOST and Fringe.
Jack Ryan seasons tended to start off strong, but then lose my interest as they got to the end. To be fair, that's also true of their source: the beginnings of Tom Clancy books are more interesting than their resolution.
We'll see.
Hopefully this doesn't go Altered Carbon and decide "This bit is too complicated for the audience, so we'll rewrite it." (Envoys were UN black ops used for civilian unrest suppression, some of whom defected, which was way more interesting than TV's "they're rebels")
Edit: What happened to Gibson being historically unwilling to sell media rights, after dissatisfaction with previous attempts?
And also, reference to the New Rose Hotel movie that was supposedly Gibson's fave: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133122/
I hardly know what to think…
Asimov is a horrible writer. The books are just bad (with the exception of the first one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555390). And if you take the series as whole, what they did in the show is really good. Imagine springing the Mule or R.Daneel Olivaw out of nowhere like the books do?
It does have some clever plot reveals, but at some point the "Ha! Little did you know this was the plan all along" becomes rote.
The failure in adaptations I see is not understanding why people liked the source and leaning into that.
It's not the window dressing / surface-level stuff that's too often mimicked: it's a more core, simple... thing.
To me, Foundation was about 'epicness across time'
But, if I wanted a better written version of that, I'd read the first 3 Dune novels.
Some parts of the internet however dislike the adaptation because the main cast is no longer almost entirely male and really hate the skin color of some of the actors.
That's a fact.
Nobody said all who disliked it did because of the casting.
The second part of your comment could have been anywhere in this thread, especially if you actually had specific complaints.
But you had to use the word woke and get angry, so you could pretend there haven't been racist comments about the show on the internet from the sci-fi community?
Pretending nobody is racist helps no one but actual racists from getting called out.
How is someone supposed to take that? Refuting an argument not made is either a great way to make a point or a great way to make someone really unhappy.
If you're agreeing with their viewpoint but for a different reason, explain the reasoning.
If you don't feel like typing out a substantive comment, why would anyone want to read the comment you barely felt like typing out.
If someone is dog whistling they are effectively conceding the argument because they're too ashamed to make the case plainly. Just take the W. The alternative is to explain to someone (and some hypothetical audience) that you you know what's going on inside someone's mind better then they do.
And again - there are people who will literally say they are Nazi's. There are people who will make not dog whistle or beat around the bush argument but straight up I am not ashamed to say arguments for awful things.
If you like Foundation and disagree with the arguments that it's not good then engage the argument made - just saying that you think there's an unstated argument and you'd like to engage with that particular one doesn't really get you anywhere.
I think Foundation admits people of other races exist by book 5, in passing. And there are like two (maybe?) notable female characters in the entire book series.
It's very, _very_ far from the books. There's no point calling it "The Foundation". It's not even the same genre - how much action is in Asimov?
It's fine to judge it on its own and say it's good or bad, but then why the name? Basically for the tv show equivalent of clickbait. Which is why I hate it.
An entire season of characters just talking about what happened instead of actually showing what happened would be painfully boring to watch.
I've only completed the first book, but thought the show did a decent enough job of having action while condensing the characters down so they could be available over multiple arcs for consistency for the contents of the first book.
>An emotionless supersoldier mary sue? It would never work as a TV series, we need to explore the spartans' emotions!
And so we get some garbage that misses what was beloved by fans and features Master Chief with his helmet off, being sad on the subway. Feels like it's written by people totally unconcerned with the source material, just like Apple-Foundation.
Unlike Apple-foundation, glimpses of what a proper Halo adaptation could have been exist:
https://youtu.be/XRMUYpH7bQk https://youtu.be/SyOAdrxlPVs https://youtu.be/40jdpzrpIps https://youtu.be/P63er_GRH1o
I'd trade the whole apple-foundation series for two minutes of content by people who cared about the books.
Is this an argument that the series is the same as the books? "Any changes that are necessary are not really changes" or such? I didn't argue that the changes are unnnecessary, or even bad. Just that they exist, and they are many. Sure sounds like you agree with me.
The Foundation TV show did not even have the same ethos, the same world-view, the same philosophical view of history as the books.
Apple wanted a big dumb heroic VFX-driven sci-fi saga TV show; and we can understand why. However, the source material that they chose is about history, and is actively hostile to the "heroic" view of history. It actually seems to be a critique of the heroic derring-do sci-fi of the day and the "great man" theory of history. (1)
It's like the showrunners did actually understand what the books were _about_, but decided to deliberately do the opposite. Maybe they actively hated the books.
I could not care less if they change skin colour or gender; or spice up the action scenes, updates like that are good, but IMHO this is by far the least of the problems with the _Foundation_ TV series.
I think to some extent the TV show is showing a variation of the timeline with respect to the rules of psychohistory: it doesn't account for individual actions (including/especially mistakes). I personally don't think it is trying to be a "Great man theory" version of Foundation, because so many of the "changes" are mistakes from the seemingly more "pristine" timeline of the books (or at least how we perceive them from how the Encyclopedia Galactica documented them).
I can definitely appreciate where that criticism comes from though, I appreciate that it is a valid point of view of the show. I just find it worthwhile to point out that I don't feel like the showrunners are as oblivious as that and I don't think they are intending a "great man" take on the show and at least in my reading of the show so far I do think there are other ways to read what they are trying to do, plus or minus the format constraints of trying to do it as a TV show with the contractual and budget/production reality of needing to keep some cast member stability from episode to episode and season to season.
Remember Magnolia? People said that was bloated.
https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/foundation-the-officia...
I enjoyed the other stuff, though it was more “inspired by the foundation universe”.
If you’re going to rewrite terminus, give us a hint as to how these people are going to wind up dominating the galaxy technologically.
If 5 people are in a room during a big event, and you interview them, you will get 5 different accounts. Where they were looking when the event happened, what their allegiances are, who their friends are, their background, etc etc all results in a different takeaway.
So I'm OK with change. I can live with it.
Yet, Foundation IMO was well beyond this degree of change. And very very important things were left out, and could have been told.
For example, Asimov constantly described a broken culture of innovation. How many no longer even understood how the machines around them worked, and maintained them by rote. How scientists would merely read old books and papers, and debate that, instead of engaging in new research. This was a strong theme, and a massive reason for the Empire to fall, yet there were only hints of it in the TV series.
This could easily have been in the series, but I really don't think many people on staff even read all the books, and it shows.
But then they also made other characters move through time so that... because they are special, and only they can save the plan!
It _entirely_ inverts (at least what I remember being) the entire point of the book, that individuals aren't uniquely special. It makes "The plan" look like a plan that needed to be actively managed by the uniquely special people involved - the same people, because they travel through time actively managing it - rather than an actual inevitable projection of history.
This then completely undercuts anything special about the Mule because, oops, we already gave people superpowers, so now it's just a generic action badass dude we have to fight.
At this point you aren't adapting foundation, you are fan-fictioning it. I guess attaching the name gets you money though.
It was a rather important, though not initially revealed, point in the original trilogy that the plan was a plan that needed to be actively managed, by uniquely special people (including, but not exclusively, the strongest telepaths that could be found and gathered.)
Revealing this before the Mule is a radical change to the structure of the story, sure, moreso than changing the nature of the specialness of the guardians.
It's definitely an interesting storytelling change, and probably for the better. Second Foundation in the books is very much a seat of the pants deus ex machina where Asimov seemed to write himself into a clever puzzle with no easy answer and cleverly solved it "at the last minute" with a retcon, then sort of took another trilogy and a half to complete the retcon and deal with the consequences.
The plan was managed to an extent. That was the second foundation's job. And if you read far enough, even that and the Empire before it was quietly tuned from afar by R. Daneel.
I mean, in the book series there's even the out-of-the-blue Mule without any retconning.
I haven't seen season 2 though
It reminded me of Amazon's horrible Tolkien series (Rings of Power), that is, exceptional special effects, but everything else sucked.
People claiming that series is bad haven't read the books in a long times.
There are no characters. There are talking heads that speak at each other. Women are non-existent. Every single person is a knight without fear or reproach. Huge galaxy-spanning powers come and go in lieu of interesting ideas (first the Mule and the R. Daneel).
The TV series (at least season 1, haven't seen season 2) is the best that could happen to the books IMO.
I enjoyed it, but I haven't watch the TV series or actually read the books, so I no idea how it lines up...
You were a fan of the books, but disliked this? ;)
To be fair, the Amazon Jack Ryan series is only related to Tom Clancy's in name(s) only. Loosely based on, Inspired by, or some other weasel words should be permanently affixed to the title screen.
On a tangent, I think the series Designated Survivor should be called Blatantly Ripped Off Clancy Plot
To me, Clancy was always {interesting event} -> {discovery of unexpectedly serious implications of event} -> {race to uncover extent of implications, before it's too late}.
And I get why he converged on that! That's a banger plot, guaranteed to sell copies!
His earlier stuff bucks this trope (e.g. Red October and Red Storm Rising), but he was something of a different author in his more technically curious years.
I just don't think there's any way to update the technology and keep the story as it was written coherent, and I don't think it's necessary.
The challenge for the showrunners is probably more that that scene was already done in one of the Matrix movies. Neuromancer was so original and has been so influential in so much mainstream media that playing it straight might feel derivative in some way.
Sure, the Sprawl trilogy has looming megacorporations, but fundamentally the Matrix is still a democratic, standardized, and free communication medium, open to use by all. Those megacorporations are simply islands in a much more vast net.
In contrast, modern computing reality is much more defined by walled gardens: Apple+Android devices, Meta, Microsoft Office, Discord.
To the extent that "doing what you want in the dangerous corners of the net" is an alien concept to younger folks.
See passage: https://genius.com/William-gibson-neuromancer-chapter-4-anno...
It was definitely less user-friendly than the AVP, so more "Power is sometimes worth inconvenience" Macintosh IIci-era Apple.
Per closest reading of the source, it seems like a complete Matrix set would be {computer} + {deck/sensory translator} + {neural interface hardware, e.g. trodes or jack}.
Believe it's also implied decks can run the Matrix standalone, without a computer, but likely have limited processing capacity.
My physical manifestation of the deck was definitely very 90s crap plastic, but hinting that there were powerful and expensive electronics concealed within.
There's also some textual stuff about them essentially being epoxy-filled / security-sealed to prevent tampering or reverse engineering.
If they do this the same way, the name Neuromancer will just be there to get some brand recognition for an arbitrary new SF series.
The Foundation trilogy in it's original form doesn't really lend itself well to television, as it was a serialized anthology, sort of like a semi-disjointed Canterbury Tales.
When trying to convert that into a big budget prestige television show a la GoT, you will have to make some significant narrative changes.
Honestly, I appreciate it as younger people like me who are derisively called "Normies" were largely turned off to Sci-Fi due to the negative perceptions of older Gen X and Millenial fans (that fat nerd character in Simpsons is sadly too close to the truth ime), and most of the criticism I've seen against the Foundation TV show is largely Gamergate-esque and annoyed that certain characters are women or not white (despite Asimov purposely writing his stories in a race agnostic manner due to his racist editor).
It is closer to the source material than the film _I, Robot_ was to the short story. It retains at least some of the overall plot.
I only watched the first episode, TBH, and didn't find it interesting enough to keep going. I'm pretty old (56) and I read my dad's original copies _Foundation_ as a little pre-teen kid, when it was already 30+ years old, and the sequel trilogy when they were newly released in the 1980s.
It has not aged well, and the producers did well to modernise it, I think.
But still...
The film I Robot started out as an unrelated sci-fi who-dunnit that had bits of I Robot (the collection by that name, not the single short story of the same name it included) grafted in because the company had the rights for a limited time and needed to do something with them or lose them.
The adaptation is very lose, but to say it has nothing in common beyond names is unfair.
I'm enjoying it (though not massively “wow”ed). A very accurate rendition of those works really would not make good TV, so I wasn't expecting it to be close to the original.
In any case, the “grittiness” and overall style is due to the director and creative team, not the company (although a company may specialize in certain genres).
Of course Apple might comission a production targeting specific demographic.
I'm hard pressed to enunciate what "a Netflix/Prime/Apple+/Paramount+/Hulu/etc show" is, distinct from the general content milieu.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/16precd/wha...
Apple+ definitely gives me a feeling of, well-polished, minimal, adult but in a cerebral, not somatic, way. Which is why I don't think they're a great fit for the very chaotic, 80s maximalism that is the Sprawl series.
>> Unlike other traditional studios, Netflix does not store/warehouse set pieces. It all gets fire-sold at wrap. So at say, Paramount, a set designer can use elements from the last 25 years stored away with Paramount. Producers can pull elements from storage and slide chunks of the budget towards casting or other high production value.
It certainly seemed like For All Mankind warehoused a significant chunk of set elements, but I assume it was no-question greenlit into subsequent seasons.
"Do we really want to have the AI kill so many people? Maybe it can just incapacitate them..."
If this were Microsoft or Google, sure.
But Apple (as a corporation) seems to, if anything, benefit from playing up fears about AI.
Reading this thread, it's interesting how divisive Apple's streaming lineup is. Sure, that's par for the course with any media, but opinions seem even more varied with Apple's.
If you're making something interesting, it's not going to be the beige thing that everyone feels "meh" (no more positive, no more negative) about.
There was no way to turn it into a television show without major rewrites.
However, Invasion is my call for the weakest scifi show they've done.
Do not watch.
No more slow burn mystery, with lots of character-based world-building, and protagonists out of their depth putting things together from a limited perspective (with the audience usually one step - but only one - ahead of them). The second season is action heavy, with characters reduced to tropes who seem to have had a knowledge download and all become "special".
I've seldom been more disappointed in a continuation of something I loved.
The book itself isn't character driven _at_all_, which makes it notoriously hard to adapt to any visual medium.
But the other shows, especially For All Mankind are really great.
If it were most other show, this particularly subplot would have made me quit but this show is so good otherwise that I still follow it despite this.
That theme is very much out of fashion, you even have people trying to argue that the Roman Empire never went into decline. Everything always gets better, because technology, the inevitability of progress, etc. Anybody who worries about decline is a reactionary, etc.
Personally I think it fell out of fashion because it makes Americans nervous. It's more comforting to think that we're at "the end of history" and American global hegemony will be forever. The Foundation is just too challenging for modern audiences.
I don't get this. The cycling of one empire ("Empire") to another ("Foundation") is ALL of the series. How can it drop it if that's what it's all about every single episode?
That's my short take, I could be more nuanced but I don't have the time for a blog post :(.
See "See" as a good example to add to that list. Silo was incredible and I started working on the books because of that show.
And the show that I was looking forward too every week "lessons in chemistry". Was so good and very charmingly nerdy.
Some others like Prehistoric Planet, Hello Tomorrow (which wasnt great, but it had a certain charm too it), and whatever that D&D show was I can't remember the name of.
But the first book was great, and so is the show!
Where more conventional authors would use a paragraph, Gibson drops select few words that convey as much. It's like reading from a zip file. It's truly something else. It'd be very difficult if not impossible to capture this in a film adaptation.
Someone who can convey the feeling and emotion of the text with just music and visuals, not by having a character or narrator blab on about how/why this tech does that and how the history of the world and blahblah.
I dispute that. It is perhaps the only SF I've ever read that solved the problem of time travel -- moving matter forwards or backwards through time -- and still told an interesting story.
I'd say in terms of realistic nature, it's maybe the best time travel story ever told.
Since the show got canceled, I don't know if it's ever explained, but the implication was that one "timeline" was essentially just a computer simulation in the other one... but if that's the case why not pause it? Why not adjust the parameters? Why can the simulation only be run in real-time?
I don't really need an answer. I don't mind suspending my disbelief for a decent story, and this was a decent story. It just stood out for me because the time travel stuff stood in contrast to the more plausible "20 minutes into the future" setting that perhaps could've made a compelling story on its own.
The book's sequels do explore some of "physics" (and "ethics") of that. Worth a read if you enjoyed the show.
That was not the case, no.
No simulations are involved.
Ok yeah I looked it up it was renewed fast in early February 2023 but was cancelled in August
I liked the book as well.
But the show was interesting, compelling, and fun. It also ended satisfyingly and absolutely doesn't need another season: in fact, it's hard to imagine a second season that doesn't go downhill. Better to leave it as it is.
There’s a comment I posted on a previous occasion, all the way back in 2011 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2565734), that I think still holds up 13 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.
If any streaming service has proven hospitable to retro futurism, it’s Apple TV+. I'm cautiously very hopeful that the Sprawl has finally found the right home for a translation to screen.
Mostly because Sonya Walger, Michael Dorman (watch Patriot!), and Sarah Jones nailed their parts.
I also hope they don't try to update themes, in particular Rastafarian Zion habitat (sort of a 1970s concept) shouldn't be chopped out... all in all seems pretty challenging, and the result might be some atrocial rewrite like the Hollywood version of Ghost In The Shell.
That said, Neuromancer is a book that's more "cool" than good; Gibson is very good at painting pictures with words, but story itself is something of a convoluted mess. Hopefully an adaptation can give the writers a chance to smooth out the elements that don't work.
There's nothing for people to follow or root for, the characters are just vehicles for the story, they don't grow or have a much of a personality.
As a voracious reader of Asimov/Clarke/etc. as a kid, I can confirm that your description fits a depressingly large fraction of that era of SciFi.
That kind of SciFi is at its best when the ideas (which are often the only thing that really matters) are so strong, they carry it all — Nightfall, Rendezvous with Rama — and at its worst when it's a bunch of “just men sitting around drinking alcohol, smoking and congratulating each other” (God, I love that description!). Even when the rest of one of his books is good, Heinlein can't resist inserting at least one pompous character just like that, and I can never believe it's not him!
The more recent deluge of female/non-binary/asexual/etc. characters and authors in SciFi is such a breath of fresh air.
In fact, I've never even heard of Wool and never would have, most likely, now it's on my to-read list.
There's some stuff in there that's going to be hard to adapt, because it works in a book but not on TV, but I'm really looking forward to it.
I (re)read the books while watching the show and yes they did some modifications, but I could see why most of them were made (the lack of intra-silo email for example) and there were a few choices that will echo into the later seasons more than I could expect. (Like people ending up in different places than in the book)
But I trust that the writers read all of the books before writing the first season =)
That being said, I was excited to see Da Shi looked almost exactly as how I pictured him, maybe a little less grizzled and angular. And I'm embarrassed to admit the cover "everything in its right place" gave me chickenskin. I think the sophon countown looked interesting (scribbling like a fast etch-a-sketch, which is probably what it would look like if it had to travel the planet all day!), and the unfolded sophon looked pretty badass. I was also thrilled about the trial of Ye Zhetai, and the army of logic gates. Hm... i'm getting excited again despite my better judgement. The suicides OTOH looked gratuitous.
The challenge will be updating it so that it feels fresh and non-derivative to an audience that has already seen "The Matrix". I wonder if they'll take the approach of renaming core elements introduced by Neuromancer like the "matrix" and "Zion", or whether they'll take the tack of keeping it all as written and leaning in ("see the material that inspired other sci-fi legends").
It's 30 parts. The acting is stilted. The camera work is strange. The special effects are cheesy. The pacing is slow.
I loved it. It was faithful to the source material, to a delightful fault.
That said, I don't know if I'd consider it enjoyable. Effects being cheesy is fine. But the pacing was very odd. Not sure if it was originally released on another schedule, but watching it straight through, the pacing seemed really odd. It started out fairly decent, but around the midpoint it seemed to keep rehashing things a lot more while completely forgetting about some threads.
I still applaud the effort, because it's not necessarily an easy adaptation, and as you say, they stick to the source pretty strictly. I'd rather a mixed but solid attempt than a complete rewrite to be more typical cable/streaming fare (which is what I expect from the upcoming Netflix version).
Also, I know this is common in reverse, but it was hilarious to see the C-grade acting from the not-Americans in the "war room" scenes. It was like someone reading from a script with zero comprehension or emotion. I was curious if they just didn't bother past finding a guy who spoke English, or if they wanted him to sound a certain way but didn't care about the acting since it wasn't aimed at an English-speaking audience.
In any case, I'm intensely curious to see how they approach the visual representation of jacking-in. How do you not have it end up like Lawnmower Man or Johnny Mnemonic? My guess would be to have jacked Case look exactly like non-jacked Case except he's in some kind of workspace or cockpit. That would allow you to have the Dixie Flatline there too for all the "as you know, Bob" asides they're probably going to need.
(Incidentally, for those old enough to have encountered that magazine, you can see it online at: https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/). I have a ton of nostalgia for Omni. It reflected the techno-optimism of the era and along with G.E.B., was a profound influence on in my life, ultimately leading me into CS.)
More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543281
Edit: I bet Wintermute will be human in the Neuromancer tv series.
The whole book is about Wintermute using humans to do its dirty work, isnt it?
Meant to evoke gray at the time, later it evoked bright blue, and now it makes no sense at all.
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load them myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers-all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.
For those not in the know.
I think the crowd on HN is old enough to have seen a static image on an analog TV.
But we have full generations that don't know what "static" looks like. To them a TV with no input is either fully black or even bright blue...
It's funny because they'll recognize it as a cultural artifact. Used for artistic effect. Whereas, for me, it meant something more practical. Meant I was up too early or too late for anything to be on the telly. Or it meant something was wrong with the reception and I'd have rearrange the rabbit ears. Later on, it meant my Atari 800's connector had gotten loose and I'd have to go back behind the massive TV to tighten it up.
Neuromancer also "needs" a proper movie adaptation not a TV show.
I'm very skeptical about this, but let's see...
He has so much good content.