Apple TV will adapt 'Neuromancer', William Gibson's disruptive cyberpunk novel

Or among the managers of Apple TV there are great lovers of science fiction or at least someone from the platform considers it useful to provide series to lovers of the genre.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
28 February 2024 Wednesday 10:31
17 Reads
Apple TV will adapt 'Neuromancer', William Gibson's disruptive cyberpunk novel

Or among the managers of Apple TV there are great lovers of science fiction or at least someone from the platform considers it useful to provide series to lovers of the genre. While they have new seasons of For All Mankind, Severance, Invasion, Silo and Foundation in production, they have just given the green light to a project with cult potential: Neuromancer, the adaptation of William Gibson's novel.

The person responsible for transferring the text to the screen is Graham Roland, creator of Jack Ryan and Dark Winds, who will be the showrunner. J.D. Dillard, who worked as a director on The Visitor, the HBO series based on Stephen King's novel, will direct the pilot episode and, therefore, will lay the audiovisual foundations for the series, which has a 10-episode first season guaranteed. .

For now, Apple TV describes Neuromancer as the story of Case, a damaged person with great skills as a hacker, who is dragged into a criminal network of digital espionage with Molly, his partner, who intends to carry out a coup against a corporate dynasty.

The interest of Neuromante lies in the reputation of the novel, which is considered a precursor of cyberpunk and one of the first works to found a digital reality, where the action is executed, instead of the physical world explored until then. And, considering that it was written in July 1984, you can understand how much of a visionary William Gibson was.

“The novel is not very interested in character or plot. "Instead, it is dedicated to creating that sense of a transformed reality, where a new vocabulary is needed to describe how perception itself has been altered by computers," noted academic John Mullan in The Guardian newspaper. the 30th anniversary of the book.

Neuromancer, moreover, was not content with becoming a cult work: it was recognized with the Nebula, Philip K. Dick and Hugo awards, the key awards in literary science fiction, and ended up being the first part of The Sprawl Trilogy that They completed Conde Cero in 1986 and Mona Lisa accelerated in 1988.

Gibson's admirers, for the record, already had an adaptation by the writer in 2022: The Peripheral, a cyberpunk thriller, which was based on the novel published in 2014. With themes around cyberspace and the immersiveness of virtual reality, it was canceled after a season due to the high costs of the production that had Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, authors of Westworld, as executive producers.