Apple announced that it’s bringing a new show to Apple TV+ based on William Gibson’s award-winning cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), offering another big moment for VR to take the limelight.
According to Apple, the upcoming 10-episode drama series is slated to follow the novel’s narrative of “a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.”
If you haven’t read Gibson’s novel, which coined the term ‘cyberspace’, you may be surprised to learn that a lot of the action is based in the VR space called the “matrix,” which is accessed not through a VR headset, but a brain-machine interface (BMI) imbedded in the user’s central nervous system. Sound pretty familiar?
Translating that to TV won’t be as straightforward as it might seem though. Gibson’s version of cyberspace looks pretty different to the social VR platforms of today, or even the sort of monolithic virtual realities seen in The Matrix trilogy, or more recently, Ready Player One, the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline which Steven Spielberg brought to film in 2018.
As Gibson describes it, his matrix is more of an abstract space that is both physically immersive, but also provides the user with direct access to data that’s decidedly way more conceptual in nature:
“Cyberspace. “Cyberspace” is a collective hallucination that millions of operators in all nations experience every day. It’s also a graphic representation of the data extracted from every computer system in human society. Complexity beyond comprehension Like city lights, receding.” Like city lights, receding.”
It can’t all be “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void” though. Committing that complex virtual reality to television will probably mean it will need to be more visual and less abstract–more like the virtual reality people know already and understand. The TV show may use more of the virtualized locations from the book. For example, the VR version of London or ‘Night City,’ a fictionalized version Chiba, Japan. While a fresh take on
Neuromancer probably won’t directly translate to headset sales, good science fiction always has a way of inspiring new generations to get into technology. To boot, many of the XR pioneers of today point to Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), which coined the term ‘metaverse’, as foundational starting points.It’s not certain when we’ll be able to watch the
Neuromancer TV show–probably in a VR headset, knowing us–although if you’re looking for a little something to read while you twiddle your thumbs (besides the book! Check out Gibson’s first VR experience and his exclamation