Apple TV+'s Neuromancer Series Takes Another Step Forward

To me, William Gibson is rare among sci-fi writers in that he never spends a paragraph explaining some whiz-bang future tech like a kid with a new toy. He just throws it all at you as part of the background. The world of Neuromancer goes by in a haze of analog static. It's a trip, and one that might be going bad. As the instigating work of the cyberpunk genre, it got people to stop and consider that maybe the future wasn't just going to be things getting better. The characters don't dwell on how we got here, and the narrator doesn't waste time explaining. The blunt poetry of the text tells you what you really need to know and what you need to feel. He doesn't waste words painting a picture of neon and microchips for you to ogle at in your mind's eye; Gibson is up to something else. This future isn't one you really want to live in.

The Foundation TV show ignored most of Asimov's writing and gave us fifty million dollars worth of planetscapes, and spaceships, and holograms, and don't forget the giant explosions.

And I'll bet they'll do the same to Gibson. They'll comb through it looking for things to spend their CGI budget on, and throw out the rest.

I'm currently up to Foundation and Earth. The show is different, but I like the changes they made for the show, especially to the emperor's lineage. The show would be painfully boring if it was filmed in the style of the books with characters talking about what happened instead of showing.

I personally find the mentalics aspect of the books kind of lame, unscientific, and God like. I hope the show does not lean so heavily into them as it continues like the books have, but seems inevitable as I read through the book series.

Severance and For All Mankind get all the hype but See, Silo, and Invasion have all been great. The only true miss in their sci-fi shows for me has been Constellation. The only more boring sci-fi show I can think of is Beacon 23.