After decades of failed attempts to film it, an adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer is finally coming to Apple TV.
My first reaction to the trailer is: I don’t hate it. It hits a lot of the right notes. And Gibson is an executive producer on the show, so presumably it won’t drift too far from the book. (Then again, Gibson wrote the screenplay for Johnny Mnemonic, so he’s not exactly infallible…)
Maybe it was fate that delayed a media adaptation until there actually were wild AIs running around lose in cyberspace.
30 or even 20 years ago, this would have been big exciting news, but a lot of water has flowed under that bridge. People that were blown away by Neuromancer in college are entering Social Security eligibility. Many of the ideas of Cyberpunk have already been woven into the fabric of science fiction as a whole, and classic high tech/low life tropes have been around so long that they’re just another flavor of nostalgia now.
Not to mention a whole bunch of the younguns what never lived under Communism, or even the 1970s, claiming we already live in a Cyberpunk Dystopia.
Obviously I had to do the meme.
So it’s hard to say how it will land in January 2027.
I don’t have any streaming services, so I’ll have to wait for others to let me know if it’s any good.
