Neuromancer Movie Deal Moving Forward

chill writes "After years in development, a film adaptation of William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is finally moving forward. According to a press release, the film has secured sales from distributors at Cannes and visual effects work has already begun. Filming will begin in 2012 with locations in Canada, Istanbul, Tokyo, and London."

Comments

The Future of the Past

[timeOday]

This book is from 1984. How can the movie have any fresh ideas? I'm having visions of "lawnmower man."

Re:The Future of the Past

[Opportunist]

The book was decades ahead of its time, it's more topical than ever. Gibson is a miracle, imo, not only because he pretty accurately predicted a future where corporations rule the world and information and information exchange has become omnipresent (ok, he overdid both a bit, but what SciFi author doesn't?), he did so without any idea of how a computer works (IIRC he said in an interview that 'til he got one, which was long after '84, he thought there's some kinda crystals spinning inside or something like that).

Gibson's Neuromancer world is a bit more advanced than ours, in good and in bad, extrapolate our reality, add a bit of pessimism and you'll get there. More corporation control, more religious lunacy, bigger separation between wealthy and poor, more integration of technology into human bodies. Some parts of it are reality already or are "around the corner". A bit more dystopian, a bit more seedy, a bit more corporation controlled, but essentially... I think the mood is quite well captured. It's a gloomy near-future setting, which will probably be near-future for the forseeable future, as it was 25 years ago.

Re:The Future of the Past

[IICV]

I read it a few years ago. Apart from being quite badly written, it was painfully dated and showed a distressing lack of understanding of basic computing concepts on the part of the author. I can imagine that someone who read it in the '80s would find it exciting and groundbreaking, but it just hasn't stood the test of time.

Yup. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter. He had never even touched a computer at the time.

If you're expecting anything even remotely resembling actual computery stuff, prepare for disappointment; nobody's going to be nmapping a target and then running sshnuke.

I would disagree that it's badly written; it's not. It's just not written clearly; it's somewhat experimental, so it often makes very little analytical sense. The idea was to convey the overwhelming feeling of constant future-shock, where as soon as you think you have a grip on some new technology a radically newer one comes out. It's kinda confusing if you try to force sense onto things; you're supposed to just absorb it and ride the wave, like the protagonist talks about early in the book IIRC.

On the other hand, it is a pretty cool story. I mean, Molly the cybernetic assassin has razor blade fingers and shades built in to her eye sockets (her tear ducts were re-routed to the roof of her mouth, so she spits instead of crying).

Basically, it's enjoyable as long as you follow the MST3K mantra. If you expect anything that even remotely resembles the realities of computing, you'll be disappointed; it's as factual The Hobbit, except set against a postmodern cybernetic background.

(It's actually kinda weird - geeks seem to have this strange idea that all science fiction should be extrapolation based on current trends, and there's no room at all for pure fantasy with a sciencey coating)

Re:It's going to be tough.

[Just Some Guy]

Neuromancer was never about technology; it was about the effects technology has on society. It could be set in the Wild West without changing the underlying themes of disenfranchisement and alienation.