Very interested in how much money they’re willing to throw at this. The broad strokes plot of Neuromancer makes for a pretty compelling heist story, but it’s a heist that takes place in space, mostly from the perspective of cyberspace, and all of it reads like it would cost a lot of money to recreate. It’s also near certain that all of the subtext is going to get scrubbed out of the show, because Wintermute is the kinda dangerous AI that spooks people, and to my understanding Apple doesn’t like negative portrayals of AI.
It might have some pretty visuals, but it’s hard to trust Apple to make anything punk.
I hated the movie ‘Starship Troopers’ when it came out because it changed everything in the book. Now I can look at it on its own merits.
I noped out of ‘Foundation’ because it was getting further and further from the books. On the other hand, I did like the Emperors’ story line and the idea of a neverending series of clones.
We could spned a few months dissecting “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep” vs. “Bladerunner.”
Remember Johnny Mnemonic with Keanu Reeves? The original short story takes place in the Neuromancer universe. I loved that movie.
I once spoke with William Gibson when he came to my city for a book club and told him about it. He said he really didn’t like the movie and it turned out into what he considered a joke. It really surprised me.
It doesn’t take place in the Neuromancer universe, whatever that means. It was an homage to the book, inspired by it, but that’s where the similarities end.
What could be more cyberpunk than Apple™️? It’s one of the worlds most powerful corporations, they have suicide nets for radically mistreated employees and normalized hyper invasive marketing, anti consumer consumerism, and put it in all your pocket so it can literally predict/shape your thoughts!
I love sci-fi, I love dystopia, I love cyberpunk. I strongly dislike neuromancer. I don’t like Gibson’s writing style. He’s horrible with characters, dialogue, and action. I understand he built an incredible world, I just don’t like what he filled it with. All that being said, I hope the fans enjoy this iteration, but after what Apple did to Foundation, I wouldn’t be surprised to see werewolves pop up in the fucking show. Good luck, fans.
I have high hopes. Everything I’ve watched on Apple had been terrific.
Foundation, For All Mankind is an excellent alternate history, Constellation is starting out strong, Severance is one of my favorite psychological thriller, Monarch was a pretty good Godzilla show, Silo was fucking excellent Fallout esqe show, and the first season of Ted Lasso was pretty good.
I disagree. The production value of Foundation was terrific. The pacing was slow and boring, and the story was drastically changed. Neuromancer doesn’t have enough content for a show, which means Apple writers are going to be writing most of it, and that’s a scary proposition for those of us who love the original work.
I think Apple has produced some of my favorite series, but there have been stinkers. Foundation was a snoozefest and See wasted some good world-building on a meh storyline and cringe characters. I didn't last two episodes of Shrinking.
Hope so! Shadowrun, which is basically Gibson’s sprawl plus magic, set in the 2050s in original editions from around 1990 -
Later editions added wireless computer connections to keep up with present technology, but wifi just doesn’t feel cyberpunk, so they later added some weird lore reason to go back to needing to plug in, for recent editions. Good change.
Come to think of it, Shadowrun lore is a Cyberpunk 2077 crossover with The Witcher (the awakening ≈ the conjunction), and witchers could work fine on SR physical-adept rules… 🤔
Watch Season 1 of Altered Carbon and then Bright (the Will Smith movie) get the people involved in both and lock them in a room with the Secrets of Power trilogy and dont let them out until they have scripts.
Read [or reread] “Damnation Alley” by Roger Zelazny. You could argue that it’s the original ‘punk’ science fiction novel. A hard bitten Hell’s Angel is chosen to drive across the post-atomic wasteland to deliver a life giving serum to the last city on the East Coast.
When I think about it, I decide that the Atomic War took place circa 1970 and keep all the background details in that era.
I’m fairly excited. I just happen to be readinglistening to Nuromancer right now. Their have definitely been more bad adaptations of his work than good… luckily I have a soft spot for B-Movies too :-)
I hope this comes out good though! It’s such an interesting time with the current debate around AI… hopefully they can restrain themselves from trying to make it to topical.
Virtually everything that they added to Foundation made the show good and all the stuff that’s pulled from the books drags the rest down.
And it really only seems to be fans of the books who aren’t able to separate the two works who hate Foundation. I think everyone I know who watched the shoe but didn’t read the books loves it.
In this case, you might be the thing that needs to change, not the show they made.
See, I disagree. They ruined it with the stuff they added, and they completely changed the premise of the books. The books aren’t about people, they’re about predictions playing out over thousands of years. The show is about people, and not very believable or interesting ones at that.
Yeah who cares about the original works! Everything is good as long as huge studios can piggy back off the name recognition from classic novels and make a bunch of money with their completely different story.
That wasn’t my only criticism of the show, and I’m certainly not alone in my opinion of it. It’s cool that you enjoyed it. They certainly put a lot of time and money into creating it. I didn’t enjoy it for the reasons I’ve already given.
The fact that book-readers don’t like the TV show isn’t some failure to conceptualise on their part - it’s because Foundation is a below-average TV show and a terrible book adaptation. The Foundation series is an examination of the social and political forces that shape society on the scale of millions of people and hundreds of years. But none of the science and politics that underpins Foundation comes through in the TV adaption. In the books, Hari Seldon is just a scientist, but in the show he becomes more like magic wizard man\Jesus allegory, while Salvor Hardin (who is mostly a politician in the books) ends up as a low-rent space action hero.
The fact that the series doesn’t directly follow the books isn’t the problem, because a 1:1 adaption of the book probably wouldn’t make for good TV, it would feel dated and dry. I generally like it when an adaption has a new, original spin on the material. The problem is, Foundation isn’t a good show on its own terms, it’s a shallow-but-flashy science fiction soap opera with thin characters and an overarching plot mostly driven by pointless mystery boxes and stupid coincidences. It never engages with the political and sociological ideas presented in the novels, but it also provides no new ideas to replace them. The whole experience feels empty and meaningless.
In your post, you don’t just say that you like it, you’re actually implying that you think the people who prefer the books are wrong, and that they have a lesser understanding of the material than you. So I ask you: what is the foundation TV show actually about?
Foundation is pretty good, it’s an adaptation of unfilmable series and I understand choices that had to be made. Back in the day I was willing to die on Tom Bombadil shaped cross but since then have learned to enjoy different takes on established stories.
Totally agree. I was put off by it at first, but I forced myself to pretend it was new IP with similar character names, and now I love it. It’s a very well-made show with excellent acting, gorgeous set design and beautiful cinematography.
I implore folks to just watch it like it’s not based on any books.
The problem for me is that I’ve read the entire series a few times and kept getting blue balled by the fake cliff hangers. I really wish we could have had Prelude and Forward before jumping straight into it.
Yeah, it was the first Sci-Fi series I read as a kid, completely opened me up to the genre. I love the source material. There are so many decisions they could have made differently, and knowing the overall arc of the series can definitely make it frustrating at times, but for me it’s also just one of those lush, well-made Sci-Fi shows that I can still lose myself in. I’m a sucker for spaceships, what can I say.
“No, I killed someone else’s kid, they just had your kid’s name.”
“So we agree you killed a child?”
Also, people that say that Foundation was unfilmable are just parroting what others have said. If it had been done by someone with any talent, it would have been just fine. Instead they gave it to a milquetoast superhero writer/director. Dune is a great example of a property that really should only work as a book, but it’s directed by someone who gives a shit and has vision.
Right? If they felt that it was unfilmable, then they shouldn’t have filmed it, and instead left it for someone who had the vision to accomplish what they could not.
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