Apple's next big sci-fi show? Neuromancer

Here's a fun bit of news that dropped yesterday: Apple has greenlit an adaptation of William Gibson's novel Neuromancer for a 10-episode series created by Graham Roland and J.D. Dillard. Of all the novels a tech company could adapt for its home-grown streaming service, this would be the one.

Published in 1984, Neuromancer is one of the best-known and influential cyberpunk novels. Gibson had grown up reading science fiction, but his interest in the genre had been rekindled when he was in his thirties and re-read Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, later noting that it was “a book that had absolutely ignored everything that science fiction had been doing when it was written.” He began writing on his own and published his first short story “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” in 1977. His next, “Johnny Mnemonic” appeared in Omni in 1981, and from there, he published a string of other short stories, many dealing with dystopic, sprawling futures that we now think of when we hear the phrase “cyberpunk.” Gibson didn’t start that genre, but he was An early proponent of it.

When Terry Carr, an editor of his, joined Ace Books and launched a line of science fiction paperbacks, he asked Gibson for a book, who accepted. He started playing with the cyberpunk worlds that he’d visited in prior stories, and began writing what would eventually become Neuromancer, which came out in 1984.

The novel follows a former hacker named Case, who had been caught stealing from an employer and was severed from the world’s digital VR world known as the “Matrix.” When he’s approached by a mysterious woman named Molly Millions with an offer to restore his access, he jumps at the chance. He discovers that he’s working for a former military officer named Armitage who’s looking to pull a digital heist that leads them to a much larger plot involving an artificial intelligence and a corporate dynasty. Gibson went on to write two more books set in the same world: Count Zero, which he published in 1986, and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988. Neuromancer went on to win a whole host of awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards in 1985.

Roland will serve as the series showrunner, while Dillard will direct the pilot episode. The series will join a growing library of science fiction shows from Apple, which includes the alternate space history For All Mankind, Monsterverse series Monarch, adaptations of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Hugh Howey's Wool, and Martha Wells' Murderbot series, and a bunch of others.

Neuromancer is one of those novels that's been in and out of development for years. There was an adaptation in the works in 2007 from Joseph Kahn, while Vincenzo Natali took a crack at the screenplay in 2010. The last effort was back in 2017, when Simon Kinberg and Deadpool's Tim Miller were working on a film adaptation for Fox.

Since its publication in 1984, the novel has been an enormous influence on other films and TV shows: The 1999 film The Matrix owes a particular debt to the novel, as does 1995’s Ghost in the Shell, not to mention a whole generation of cyberpunk novels, such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

It's not the first Gibson novel to get the adaptation treatment: Westworld's Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy adapted his novel The Peripheral for Amazon in 2022 (sadly, its renewal was nixed due to last year's writer's strike), while his short stories Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel were adapted as films in 1995 and 1998, respectively.

The adaptation is simultaneously a big get for the tech company's streaming service, and one that feels a little strange. Cyberpunk was in many ways a reaction to some of the tropes and trends of science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s: a subversive and as writer and editor Bruce Sterling described it in his anthology Mirrorshades, “disentangling SF from mainstream influence, much as punk stripped rock and roll of the symphonic elegances of Seventies ‘progressive rock.’”

With that in mind, it’ll be positioned as of Apple’s biggest gets: one of the most influential novels of the technology age, adapted by one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Apple played up its image as an upstart company in the computer world, notably with its 1984 ad (directed by Ridley Scott), which saw a protagonist throwing a hammer through a screen with a Big Brother-like figure in a dystopian world, a statement about what Apple hoped to do in a world dominated by IBM.

The announcement comes at an apt time for Apple: it just launched its own augmented reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, which retails for $3500 and promises to be something of an advance in the world of VR. I have to imagine that you’ll be able to watch the series with some sort of crazy special feature like extra wraparound, spatial sound, immersive something or other to go along with the experience. Or at the very least, some sort of video or marketing that shows off how you can watch the series wearing one of these headsets.

It’s hard to imagine Apple being subversive in the way that cyberpunk authors have often imagined giant tech conglomerates: it feels like the type of company that an author would use to pull a heist against. But, it does seem like the type of story that they’d be all over, if anything, because it’s one of those stories that’s so influential for the people who’re part of the technology sector. Hopefully, they won’t lose sight of the subversive mindset that really makes Neuromancer — and the other novels like it — stand out.