Apple has officially started work on Neuromancer, a new 10-episode adaptation of William Gibson's 1984 novel. Check out the announcement teaser above, which highlights the moody interiors typical of the cyberpunk genre.
Cyberpunk stories take place in dystopian futures where things like cybernetics and artificial intelligence have been integrated into societies. Often there's a huge amount of wealth inequality. Neuromancer didn't invent the cyberpunk, but it did help popularize it. You can see the book's influence everywhere, from Blade Runner to Ready Player One to Cyberpunk 2077. And Gibson was the first person to use the term "matrix" to describe an immersive digital world, so we have him to those movies.
So Neuromancer had a huge influence on cyberpunk and on sci-fi in general, but mostly in terms of mood and setting; I don't feel like many people are familiar with the actual plot. It's about a hacker named Case, who will be played by Masters of the Air's Callum Turner. He and the cyborg assassin Molly (Briana Middleton) try to pull off a heist on a mega-corporation. The teaser above is set at Chatsubo, a bar in Japan where ex-pats like Case hang out.
With income inequality at staggering highs and artificial intelligence a topic of daily concern, our reality feels more cyberpunk every day, so the the time may be ripe for a good Neuromancer adaptation. Numerous attempts have been made to turn the book into a movie before, but all of them fell apart.
If anybody can do it, it's Apple TV+. I love these nerds. Just think about the sheer number of elaborate sci-fi shows they've pushed onto the platform, many of them quite good:
- Dark Matter
- For All Mankind
- Foundation
- Invasion
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
- Murderbot
- See
- Severance
- Silo
- Star City
Star City, a spinoff of the space race drama For All Mankind, hasn't aired yet, but I'm still counting it because wow and damn, do the people running things at Apple TV+ love them some science fiction. And now they're adding Nueromancer to their catalog. And knowing Apple, they're going to follow it through to the end, rather than cancel the show partway through like other, more cowardly streaming services.
There's no release set for Neuromancer set as of yet, but we'll keep our ears to the ground. In the meanwhile, the third season of Foundation, based on Isaac Asimov's book series, premieres next Friday.
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h/t Polygon