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Sci-Fi

William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' to Become a Series on Apple TV+ 149

Posted by EditorDavid from the cyberpunk-2024 dept.
It's been adapted into a graphic novel, a videogame, a radio play, and an opera, according to Wikipedia — which also describes years of trying to adapt Neuromancer into a movie. "The landmark 1984 cyberpunk novel has been on Hollywood's wishlist for decades," writes Gizmodo, "with multiple filmmakers attempting to bring it to the big screen." (Back in 2010, Slashdot's CmdrTaco even posted an update with the headline "Neuromancer Movie In Your Future?" with a 2011 story promising the movie deal was "moving forward....")

But now Deadline reports it's becoming a 10-episode series on Apple TV+ (co-produced by Apple Studios) starring Callum Turner and Brianna Middleton: Created for television by Graham Roland and JD Dillard, Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly (Middleton), a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.
More from Gizmodo: "We're incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+," Roland and Dillard said in a statement. "Since we became friends nearly 10 years ago, we've looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that's come after it and we're looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson's definitive 'cyberpunk' world."
The novel launched Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy of novels (building on the dystopia in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome"), also resurrecting the "Molly Millions" character from Johnny Mnemonic — an even earlier short story from 1981...
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William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' to Become a Series on Apple TV+ More

William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' to Become a Series on Apple TV+

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  • And yet...William Gibson had neither owned nor ever used a computer when he published Neuromancer

  • Combined sci-fi with noir to create cyberpunk. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday June 30, 2024 @09:09PM (#64591165)
    Helped keep sci-fi relevant to youth at a time when Buck Rogers stuff was utterly moth-eaten, and hippie resurgence stuff like Dune had yet to fully translate into the culture.

  • NO GOD NO (Score:3)

    by troff ( 529250 ) on Sunday June 30, 2024 @09:23PM (#64591175) Homepage Journal

    Oh HELL NO. The Foundation garbage show was the absolute intellectual and moral inversion of everything Asimov's books had to say.

    The stupid moron Goyer went on a PR binge saying how it was inspired by Asimov's concerns about Hitler marching across Europe, when the foreword to the 1951 imprint was Asimov explaining how while Hitler was marching across Europe, Asimov was worried about what next pitch he was going to take to his publisher. That foreword spells out EXPLICITLY what the influences and inspirations were.

    And the scene in the show where the "scientists" are debating which timepiece to archive and they pick the sundial over the water clock in case someone settles a planet with NO LIQUID WATER.
    Or the "farming world" of Helicon in orbit around a DARK STAR.

    No fucking no giving them "Neuromancer"? The studios should be burned to the ground as it is for what they did to Asimov. Burn the place to the ground and don't bother checking to see Goyer and his writers have left yet.

    • And yet, it's the best adaptation that's been tried. (Relax. There will be another attempt someday.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by troff ( 529250 )

        And yet, it's the best adaptation that's been tried. (Relax. There will be another attempt someday.)

        I realise that for this, our first interaction, I'm going to seem excessive. The problem now is that you have just demonstrated that you are absolutely an equally bad part of the problem.

        You say "it's the best" and "there'll be another attempt" and imply it will be better. Well, that's garbage. Those are lies from hell.

        There were audio adaptations and they were MUCH BETTER. Eight part radio by BBC Radiophonic with Julian Glover as Hober Mallow.

        Unless society changes radically, the trend will continue downwa

        • "Psychohistory would have been completely thrown off by a girl with psychic powers."

          As, indeed, it was. Well, a *guy* with psychic powers, but that doesn't make a significant difference to the point.

          "And the Terminus authority figure, not saying "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent", instead saying "I'm going to see what violence I can muster"."

          Gah. That right there ensures that I will never, ever watch this.

          "Don't you see? It's Galaxywide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration

      • In what way is it "the best", when it isn't even tangentially related to the Azimov books? The only thing that relates to the Foundation series are the names of some of the protagonists, everything else is just some exercise in writing of an average high school student. Or maybe of the then current iteration of AppleGPT.

    • Re:NO GOD NO (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Sunday June 30, 2024 @10:41PM (#64591255) Homepage Journal

      U mad bro?

      On the one hand, I am with you. I read reviews of the Apple foundation series because I was skeptical, and it was clear that this was "Foundation" in setting only. Some character names, too. But a completely different plot with different messages. So, nothing I was interested in.

      But here's the thing: I didn't get mad about it. I just recognized that I am not the target audience. I am too much of a purist. Same with other adaptations of sci fi books. They always disappoint, for many reasons.

      But the main reason is simple economics. Making these movies and these episodes costs a whole lot of money. Nobody funds that sort of thing out of a spirit of artistic or intellectual expression....but out of a desire to make money. Profit pays for the whole party. And, in order to make money, the product needs to have broad appeal. It needs to be pleasing to a whole lot of people.

      The problem with really top-notch, in-depth, challenging, and philosophical science fiction is that the target audience is too small. Even if we can say in some sort of objective sense that it is outright better than other material, it still only appeals to a subset of the population with the right set of preferences to be able to appreciate it. Its just not a big enough audience to appease.

      It is also true that, recently, key members of the industry have pushed really hard on injecting political messaging into the content, in a clear effort at social engineering. We have seen many of these fail catastrophically with a lot of industry-drama as a result, but in this case there are enough rich people with strong political motivations to keep the pressure on that. For now, at least. But they are going to keep working the formula until they find ways of making it profitable. Simple economic natural selection guarantees it.

      But one thing they won't do is make it faithful to the source material. There is just too little money in that.

      The anger about this is unwarranted. They aren't harming the source material nor the people who love it. The exercise of reading is very healthy for the brain and you get the top-notch quality stuff that way. So, just let it go. Your emotional energy is better invested elsewhere.

      • But here's the thing: I didn't get mad about it. I just recognized that I am not the target audience.

        Without having read any of Asimov myself, it sounds like what they did is just create a similar in concept story and effectively used his name to buy an audience who otherwise wouldn't have even paid attention to it. In which case, they're basically just doing a disservice to Asimov fans in order to promote their shitty streaming service that apparently nobody is watching.

        Which actually sounds like a typical apple move.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by troff ( 529250 )

        U mad bro?

        Ah. The mating call of the decerebrate worldwide.

      • Re:NO GOD NO (Score:4, Insightful)

        by IDemand2HaveSumBooze ( 9493913 ) on Monday July 01, 2024 @04:59AM (#64591645)

        But the main reason is simple economics. Making these movies and these episodes costs a whole lot of money. Nobody funds that sort of thing out of a spirit of artistic or intellectual expression....but out of a desire to make money. Profit pays for the whole party. And, in order to make money, the product needs to have broad appeal. It needs to be pleasing to a whole lot of people. The problem with really top-notch, in-depth, challenging, and philosophical science fiction is that the target audience is too small. Even if we can say in some sort of objective sense that it is outright better than other material, it still only appeals to a subset of the population with the right set of preferences to be able to appreciate it. Its just not a big enough audience to appease.

        This is the thing I don't understand, though. It's been very obvious for a long time now that if the goal is to make profit, then what they're doing isn't working. At all. For a long time stuff that Hollywood and the big streaming studios have been releasing has not been at all well-received OR profitable. And it's not rocket science, really. Asimov has a little bit of name recognition but it's no Star Wars. The Foundation Series or Neuromancer are not really a household names. It's obvious that pretty much the only people who will be interested in this based on name only will be nerds. Which is a pretty small target audience. And they've seen so many times that nerds don't seem to enjoy constant DEI messaging and braindead plots. The Venn diagram of people who enjoy this shit and people who enjoy something like Asimov is pretty much an empty set. But they keep doing it.

        If you want to market to a large target audience, you need a new IP, that appeals to a wide audience. Because all the existing ones with any kind of mass appeal have pretty much been exhausted. But a lot of these big studios seem deathly afraid of taking any chances on new IPs, instead desperately searching for existing ones, even though they're down to pretty obscure (by mainstream standards) ones now.

        I think the problem is, a while back with all the superhero movies it looked like with all the studios have found a formula to print money. Make a movie based on another superhero, put a shitton of (very expensive) CGI in it, hire some well known actors, get record profits again. Then two things started happening - they started putting a ton of woke messaging into plots, completely tanking their quality in process, and people started getting tired of superheroes. Now it's clearly not working anymore, and yet they're too afraid to step away from the formula. I'm thinking it might take a bankruptcy of a major studio for these people to finally admit that they need to try something different. For a start, do they really need to spend so much on CGI? A more niche series with a smaller budget could still be profitable, and a lot of those could end up bringing quite a bit of cash in, pretty simple math.

    • And the scene in the show where the "scientists" are debating which timepiece to archive and they pick the sundial over the water clock in case someone settles a planet with NO LIQUID WATER.
      Or the "farming world" of Helicon in orbit around a DARK STAR.

      No fucking no giving them "Neuromancer"? The studios should be burned to the ground as it is for what they did to Asimov. Burn the place to the ground and don't bother checking to see Goyer and his writers have left yet.

      In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by troff ( 529250 )

        I'm not sure I've ever felt more justified in reading somebody's irrelevant response about a cartoon and calling them an idiot before. Idiot.
        ASIMOV'S WORK WHICH WAS A CLASSIC PIECE OF SCIENCE-FICTION AND THE STATE OF HUMANITY.

        What's the point. You're as broken as the very problems he was writing about, you miserable decerebrate.

        • decerebrate

          decerebrate
          decerebrate

          decerebrate
          So I used to do this when I was a kid.
          But when you learn a rare word and say it multiple times a day, people learn the bounds of your vocabulary. They don't walk away thinking you speak only in words heard less than once a year. At least not when the word is "decerebrate".

          You know I've recently suffered a loss? I have a need for a certain sort of poster when I come to Slashdot and well...
          anyhow it's very nice to meet you and I hope you com here often.

    • Oh HELL NO. The Foundation garbage show was the absolute intellectual and moral inversion of everything Asimov's books had to say.

      Given the Foundation books *were* garbage, doesn't that mean the show is the most accurate rendering of the content under discussion?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Johnny Mnemonic shows that Hollywood CAN do a good job with Gibson cyberpunk. And the story in Neuromancer doesn't have concepts that are too far outside the norm of what Hollywood would be OK with putting in a movie these days (nothing that would be controversial for example). I don't recall the book going into too much detail about exactly how the characters looked or their ethnicity or race either so that helps.

      The big problem I have is them getting the visuals right. Cyberspace needs to look like the or

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There was always going to be a lot of hate for Foundation, because it's one of those series of books that is almost impossible to film without major changes. Even the BBC radio drama version had to make big omissions and changes, and still largely sucked.

      Given that, I think they did a great job. You just have to have it in your head not to be expecting an exact translation of the books, but rather something built on the principles and characters, and some new ideas that have evolved in the decades since it

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by troff ( 529250 )

        that is almost impossible to film without major changes

        Prove it.

        You just have to have it in your head not to be expecting an exact translation of the books, but rather something built on the principles and characters

        Do you know what "principles" actually means? Have you actually looked INSIDE THE BOOKS AND NOT JUST DRIBBLED SALIVA ON THE COVERS?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          You want me to prove that Foundation could not be shot closely following the book and be good? How? Spend millions of Euros doing it?

          I'd point to the BBC radio drama version. They tried to stick to the book and it didn't work very well. If you have ideas about where they went wrong and how it could be improved, feel free to share them. I somehow doubt anyone is going to spend millions just to prove that it would suck though.

          Perhaps you could be specific about what principles you feel that the TV adaptation

      • "Given that, I think they did a great job."

        Having the mayor of Terminus advocate violence as the best solution is the polar opposite of "a great job."

    • I don't know about being burned to the ground, but I'm already unfortunately forced to start questioning the motives behind their casting decisions, in part because of the abominative way they just ignored large parts of Foundation to make things more "splashy" or something I guess.

  • snow crash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Sunday June 30, 2024 @10:38PM (#64591249)

    I might have tried Snow Crash first, to test the waters.

    • Despite the fact the novel reads like it was taken from a screenplay, there's... some content that would need to have to change.

      Don't make me explain it :)

      • Don't make me explain it :)

        I will take "Please explain dentata" for $50!

        • As cool as it would be to have to explain dentata, that's not actually what I was referring to. Not directly anyway.

          • Explain it already, or stop with the FUD.

            • One of the main characters is a 16 year old girl.

              She's the one with the dentata.

              By itself an anti-rape device might not be problematic. The humorous circumstances in which it appears and is used, chekov's gun style, are integral to one arc of the plot.

              It's probably sufficient to make her older, but I think some people in hollywood will probably have some kind of issue with this.

          • YT needs to be 18. Her sex scenes were super fucking sketch but more likely to be waved away as gritty detail back in the 90s.
            In 2024 it's like "Why the fuck does this need to be here?"

            • I'm thinking that probably wont go far enough.

              I assume Stevenson was trying to appeal to that movie kinda feel, but I agree that making her underage was really unnecessary.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson not Gibson.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by necro81 ( 917438 )

        Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson not Gibson.

        Probably what the GP meant was: try a different, more modest cyberpunk novel for adaptation first. If that's successful, then turn your sights to the much more ambitious and sprawling ur-Cyberpunk.

  • But made to appeal to who? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Sunday June 30, 2024 @10:41PM (#64591253)

    The main issue I see with this is computing and the idea of the Internet was a very different thing in the time Gibson wrote Neuromancer. Arguably Apple's target audience for this would have trouble identifying with a techno thriller that is true to computing as he wrote it. Just like I would have trouble engaging with a movie based on computing with punch-card programming and acoustic coupler modem connections.

    Techno-Dystopias don't even trend to the gritty life-on-the-streets mega-corpo world that Gibson envisioned. The shiny-and-clean Anti-Utopia story (think Brave New World or Gattaca) seem to be more en vogue. So, what are we going to get? A bastardized tale of an app-filled existence with characters that happen to be named the same as Gibson's book? How does Dixie Flatline fit into a story I'm sure will include advanced, modern A.I.s?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BigZee ( 769371 )
      I can't help feeling that this is another book, that to be adapted properly, would not really be filmable. It's a long time since I've read the book but my recollection is that so much of it isn't really visual. TV is a visual medium so they will need to adapt what was a fundamental part of the story to make things work, otherwise, a lot of the time will be watching someone sat in a chair with a headset on.
      • I too haven't read it in a long time so I may be misremembering, but I think modern audiences are familiar with an immersive abstract VR world and AI avatars doing battle. Even the idea of the AI being able to attack the human hacker is not so far fetched these days. Lots of people wear headphones and have high refresh rate screens for gaming. Imagine if you got to a "bad" website and, as countermeasures, your browser makes a sound so loud it damages your eardrums, or makes the screen flash in a way to give

    • Just like I would have trouble engaging with a movie based on computing with punch-card programming and acoustic coupler modem connections.

      Hey we're talking about regular mainstream movies not PORN
      All that is way too sexy to leave room for a plot.

  • All they want is the search term and the traffic it gets. The script and TV show and drama after it tanks is just part of the price.

    Right now, genre notwithstanding, ain't ten screenwriters in Hollywood or Silicon Valley that could write an original script, get it produced and turn a profit. The only bankable name I can think of is Sorkin and he's long past caring I'd guess.

    If a producer walked into a writer's room and said "develop a sweet 90-minute romance I can turn into a film" everyone would shriek som

    • You could always write a script and sell it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by The Cat ( 19816 )

        I've got readers in nine countries.

        But I can guarantee you this: I could walk into Warner Bros. with a Hugo Award and a 5.5 rating in my pocket tomorrow and they wouldn't offer me four bits.

        It's not about talent or money any more. Hasn't been about any of those things for years. It's dark and corrupt and I wouldn't let those fuckin' ghouls anywhere near my characters.

    • If a producer walked into a writer's room and said "develop a sweet 90-minute romance I can turn into a film" everyone would shriek something about Trump, rip their clothes off and start throwing shit at each other.

      Is this correct? It seems to imply that writers have a lot of power, contrary to the old joke [screenrant.com]:

      The real-life screenwriter starlet joke states “There is a starlet so dumb that she slept with the screenwriter in hopes of advancing her career.” The joke is intended to illustrate that screenwriters are the least powerful people in Hollywood and plays into the movie's themes around the pursuit of power and its preeminence in Mr. Harrigan's mind. Despite the idea of sexual politics in the movie industry, most screenwriters laugh at the joke because it's less about someone sleeping her way to the top and more about how screenwriters mean next to nothing in Hollywood. What seems to be a throwaway line helps strengthen the underlying message of the film.

  • Simple observation (Score:3)

    by Gideon Fubar ( 833343 ) on Monday July 01, 2024 @12:55AM (#64591379) Journal

    There are already people in the comments getting mad that Gibson was wrong because the internet didn't turn out like he specified.

    Apparently they haven't worked out that it was already a complete alternate history before they read it. There are references to historical 20th century wars in those stories that didn't happen in our world. Also... since apparently the fact it was fantasy wasn't blatant enough, there are the Loa.

    It's kind of a pity that people are likely to miss the nuance of interaction between the projection and the world we really live in, that the difference between these two things is not an error. But then they'd first have to accept that the sprawl cycle is not a story about *computers*... And it seems like both people who consider themselves experts and people who consider computers an other that they suspend disbelief around... It very much seems like those folks are in agreement that actually it's about computers because people pay attention to computers in it.

    • Well even with low concept sci fi people can miss a fairly simple hero's story and get really into exactly how a plasma sword would work, or why positrons would be a useful thing to make an artificial brain out of. If anything I think sci fi and fantasy work by putting these ideas into comfort food burrito wraps so folks expose themselves to the more interesting ideas at all, even if their conscious thoughts may be about details about various impossible FTL travel mechanisms.
  • Having read Neuromancer at least a dozen times, unless they stay true to the actual story, I think a 10-episode miniseries adaptation of it will make my head hurt.
    On the other hand I won't be paying to see it, so like with Star Trek: Discovery, I'll just point and laugh at whatever stupid shit they do to it, and be glad I can go back and re-read the novel at will.

    I just hope it's not as bad as Johnny Mnemonic was, which was to SciFi as The Craft was to the occult.

  • "Noun, verb, wokeism. Everything is a conspiracy. MAGA MAGA! Jewbag faggits everywhere!"
  • I noticed on the front page that this article has passed 100 comments, which doesn't happen here very often any more. I thought "wow, an article with over 100 comments that isn't politics!"

    Then I started reading the comments ... well, at least the first part was correct. Naturally some people found justification to insert their politics into this discussion regardless.
  • Featuring some character names from the book Neuromancer

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