Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Favorite William Gibson Novel?

dryriver writes: When I first read William Gibson's Neuromancer and then his other novels as a young man back in the 1990s, I was blown away by Gibson's work. Everything was so fresh and out of the ordinary in his books. The writing style. The technologies. The characters and character names. The plotlines. The locations. The future world he imagined. The Matrix. It was unlike anything I had read before. A window into the far future of humanity. I had great hopes over the years that some visionary film director would take a crack at creating film versions of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive . But that never happened. All sorts of big budget science fiction was produced for TV and the big screen since Neuromancer that never got anywhere near the brilliance of Gibson's future world. Gibson's world largely stayed on the printed page, and today very few people talk about Neuromancer, even though the world we live in, at times, appears headed in the exact direction Gibson described in his Sprawl trilogy. Why does hardly anybody talk about William Gibson anymore? His books describe a future that is much more technologically advanced than where we are in 2017, so it isn't like his future vision has become "badly dated." To get the conversation going, we rephrased dryriver's question... What is your favorite William Gibson novel?

Comments

The one he has not written

[inking]

As much as I like the genre, I think they are all bad.

Neuromancer

[jonwil]

I wish someone would turn Neuromancer into a film, it would be far better than a lot of the garbage we get at the cinema these days.

Re:Neuromancer

[Opportunist]

Impossible. You can try, but I am certain you'll fail just like all others did. Try it yourself. Take the novel and turn it into a script. Then gauge just how long it really is and what run time you'd end up with. Not with the whole trilogy, just the first, just NM. You end up with a movie that runs 5 hours and you already left out half of what's important. Cut it more and what you end up with is a movie that makes no sense, explains no character, you will of course get a story out of it but in the end, nobody who knows the novel will recognize it anymore.

A lot of the novel is internal monologue and information about the characters' mood, ideas, ideals, hopes and expectations. How'd you want to do that, if at all? In a voiceover while they stare meaningful into the evening sky that looks like a TV tuned to a dead channel?