Science fiction is, almost by definition, an invitation to create anachronisms. By the time the present catches up with the future, various aesthetic and narrative choices within a sci-fi story can suddenly seem silly or outdated. In a best-case scenario, like the 60s Star Trek, certain analog technology can seem to generate nostalgia that allows us to compensate for any sort of plausibility gap. Or in the case of something like Blade Runner, we can casually accept that the future it projected of “Los Angeles, November 2019” takes place in an alternate timeline. When Blade Runner 2049 was made in 2017, we all shrugged our shoulders and agreed that this future was built on an alternate past. No technological retcon was needed; as long as the audience does a bit of mental gymnastics.
But, now, after 41 years, a close sci-fi sibling of Blade Runner is finally going to be adapted for the screen. William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk masterpiece, Neuromancer is being produced by Apple TV+ and has started to announce various cast members, including, Callum Turner as Case, Briana Middleton as Molly Millions, and Mark Strong as Armitage. The show is created by Graham Roland and J.D. Dillard with Gibson serving as an executive producer. For fans of the author’s work, this will be the second major TV series to tackle his cyberpunk ethos, following the tragically underrated 2022 Amazon series, The Peripheral, based on Gibson’s 2014 book of the same name. But, there’s a big difference between adapting a 2014 Gibson cyberpunk book and a 1984 cyberpunk book, and it all comes down to just how this new show will handle those pesky anachronisms.
Future Nostalgia
“The cyberpunk hard guys of science fiction, with their sharp black suits and their surgically implanted silicon chips, already have a certain nostalgic romance about them,” William Gibson wrote for Time Magazine in 2000, in an essay entitled “Will We Have Computer Chips in Our Heads?” Essentially, he’s been aware of this wrinkle for two decades, well after Neuromancer became a hit book. As he puts it in the same essay: “In hindsight, the most memorable images of science fiction have more to do with our anxieties in the past (the writers’ present) than with those singular and ongoing scenarios that make up our life as a species; or real futures, our ongoing present.”
And it’s in this dichotomous split — between aesthetic power and future fidelity — that the new Neuromancer series will have to make a very important choice. Will it go the Blade Runner 2049 route and simply exist in an anachronistic alternate past, or fundamentally alter the nature of Neuromancer to make it more “realistic” for today’s audiences?
To recap, the story of Neuromancer takes place in the near future, and in it, data that can be hacked in cyberspace translates to a booming criminal business. The story revolves around one former hacker, a “cowboy” named Case, who, after having his nerve-endings fried by some crooks he tried to double-cross, is pulled back into the hacking game by a shadowy organization. The epic story takes Case across a dystopian future world, including a massive city called The Sprawl, and eventually has him facing down with not one, but two different AIs. Here’s the thing though: The book was written in 1984, so Case talks about stuff like trying to sell “Three megabytes of hot RAM” while living in a high-tech world without cell phones. As Gibson jokes in his 2004 introduction to the novel, “The Sky Above the Port,” there are several moments in the book that could jar a contemporary reader, such as “Case’s puzzlingly urgent demand, when the going gets tough, for a modem.”
In Gibson’s 1984 imagination, the concept of cyberspace is more like what we saw in The Lawnmower Man, or Tron than the more mundane version of the internet we actually got. In the cyberpunk future of Neuromancer, the pull between the analog world and the digital world is more interesting, more pronounced, and extreme than the slightly lazier, and depressing way we access the internet now. There’s no need to “jack in” to cyberspace today, and nobody needs to be as cool as Case to find weird pieces of data or a meddling AI online. In Neuromancer, the menacing AI Wintermute was scary and memorable as hell. (Mission: Impossible’s “The Entity” is a near-total ripoff of Wintermute from Neuromancer.)
Today, some of us struggle with trying to turn off various glitchy AI assistants that are ruining our Word docs or Zoom calls. If I’m nostalgic for anything, it’s AI that is actually messing up my life in a cool way rather than whatever it is Gemini is doing to my search results
Update the Tech, Lose the Appeal
This is where it seems almost impossible for Neuromancer to try to update the technology of the book to match it with contemporary culture. In a sense, the romance of the book, the reason why it is so readable and such a classic is found in the 1980s cyberpunk aesthetics. Remaking the world of Neuromancer would be like remaking The Matrix, but this time, Neo isn’t allowed to wear shades, and instead, has to be dressed like Mark Zuckerberg. The basic coolness of Neuromancer is inextricably tied up in the texture of the book’s imagery, whether those exist in the virtual world, or the real world.
Sure, there are certain things a contemporary “update” of Neuromancer could pull off without having to build the narrative on a future history in which cell phones don’t exist. The nature of Night City, The Sprawl, and the “coffins” that Case sleeps in can all work in an updated future as well as an anachronistic one. Molly’s retractable razor claws can work just fine whether she has a TikTok account or not, but there’s something about imagining these characters with contemporary references that just feels off.
It would be easy to handwave this away and use something like Westworld as an example of how to walk this line effectively. Once that series left the robot amusement parks in season three, the future world it presented felt similar to ours, with some minor differences. The key to Westworld’s aesthetic success was a minimalist approach. But, shows like Westworld, and Altered Carbon, inherently dealt with analog things in a cyberpunk context: Robot bodies, clone bodies, and the like. Neuromancer is somewhat the opposite, while the analog real world (complete with payphones and “jacking in”) is a big part of the book, the virtual world is equally important to the story.
And it’s here, in the nostalgic version of William Gibson’s conception of cyberspace that the Apple TV+ version of Neuromancer will have to make the hardest decisions. There’s no way to predict which kind of science fiction will “age well” nor what we even mean by that phrase. Arguably, Blade Runner —with its Atari Signs and video call payphones —has aged well not in spite of its anachronisms, but because of them. And it seems likely that if the TV version of Neuromancer wants to capture the essence of what makes the book great, it will avoid the temptation to “fix” things that aren’t broken. Science fiction is an artform that endures because we understand imagination runs into the past and future. By letting Neuromancer remain a cellphone-less world, we’re letting science fiction be its purest, most interesting self.
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