The notoriously unfilmable book that gave birth to cyberpunk and predicted some of the biggest technological concepts of our age is finally coming to the screen. Apple TV is adapting William Gibson's Neuromancer for a ten-episode series, and the news has been greeted with a mixture of excitement and fear by fans of the 1984 novel.
Over the decades, directors from Chris Cunningham to Chuck Russell, Vincenzo Natali and most recently Tim Miller have been linked to movie adaptations that never got off the ground. A 1995 movie of Johnny Mnemonic, a short story that preceded Neuromancer, got panned.
Now J.D. Dillard (Sleight, Devotion) and Graham Roland (Dark Winds) are taking on what's probably Apple TV's boldest project yet. Will their small screen Neuromancer succeed in translating the book's abstract concepts of cyberspace and autonomous AIs? The poster design has already sparked debate.
William Gibson's debut sci-fi novel follows Henry Case, a crippled hacker who's hired by a figure named Armitage and the cyborg Molly to merge two powerful artificial intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer. It's set in a world where humans can interact with computers by 'jacking in' to a digital plane called cyberspace.
Apple TV's first poster design for its Neuromancer series isn't giving much away. The minimalist design has only two elements, but they're both interesting.
First there's the font. The vertical lines are suggestive of data streams or dripping code, or perhaps a visual metaphor for falling into cyberspace. But what I also like most is the retro-futuristic feel that follows a long tradition in the book cover designs.
There have been many dozens of editions of Neuromancer published in many languages. The cover art has varied dramatically, from the gritty comic-like artwork of Josan Gonzalez for a Brazilian edition to surreal illustrations that could have appeared on any number of rave flyers in the '90s to Gollancz's trademarket plain-yellow cover.
One thing that has united most cover designs is a general consensus that the title needed to appear in a futuristic font, and that the font might have the power to say more than any image.
As for the image in Apple TV's poster design, the gritty, tactile quality feels perfect for Gibson's grimy dystopian vision. But its subject is generating debate.
The poster appears to show a port or jack implanted behind someone's ear. In the novel, Case used electrodes to connect to cyberspace, not an implanted plug.
Is the person in the image someone else, then? Over on Reddit, some people suggest it might be the software booth worker Larry. In the novel, he was described as having a bunch of neural sockets for chips called microsofts. But would Apple put a relatively minor character on the poster? It seems more likely that the series might change some of the tech from the novel.
That wouldn't necessarily be a bad decision. Some of the future that Gibson imagined has already happened – perhaps because of how popular Neuromancer was among computer science students. But there are also details like payphones and physical media that make the novel feel anachronistic.
Updating the tech for a world where we already have mobile phones, VR headsets and companies testing implantable brain-computer interfaces could allow the series to present the story in a way that makes it still feel like a plausible near future for today's world.
While some of the details of Neuromancer have dated, the story is as relevant as ever. The author wasn't particularly interested in the specifics of the technology but the bigger themes around counterculture, societal decay and questions of morality. How Apple TV handles these will determine the success of its adaptation. It it does it well, there's plenty more for it to explore with the other two novels in the Sprawl Trilogy.
No precise release date has been announced, but Neuromancer is slated to come to Apple TV this year.
