There were several sidelights along the road to this moment, starting with Johnny Mnemonic in 1996. (My response to hearing of this latest adaptation attempt: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”) The rumors, anticipation, and disappointments surrounding the film’s production are legion. Fake movie trailers have been sewn together fan-made movie posters have been photoshopped. The Wikipedia section on Neuromancer‘s numerous aborted film adaptations doesn’t do justice to its rocky history. Every few years over the subsequent decades, news would percolate up that a movie adaptation was in the works, only for the organizers to lose interest, fail to find finding, or simply not get the green light. Hence Neuromancer on film has been a hot topic among science fiction fans since the book was first published in 1984. There’s science fiction before Neuromancer, and there’s science fiction after Neuromancer. But both authors took earlier bricklaying done by them and other writers, pulled it all together, and buffed the final result to a chrome-like sheen. Just as Raymond Chandler did not invent the hard-boiled detective novel, William Gibson did not invent cyberpunk. Neuromancer is a brilliant novel, one of my favorites, and by my lights, the book that rearranged science fiction. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.” Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way.
The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. The big question Illuminerdi concerns itself with is which actor will play protagonist Case, a drug-abusing hacker hired to pull off a virtual heist in cyberspace. The Illuminerdi ( via) reports Apple TV+ is tooling up to produce a streaming adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer.
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