Apple TV's trailer made me re-read Neuromancer, and I noticed one impressive detail
The show might be more faithful than you'd expect
When Apple dropped its Neuromancer trailer at the start of this week, it reminded people that it's undoubtedly the reigning monarch of sci-fi in the streaming world. It just can't stop churning out high-quality, high-concept fare, and this looks like the latest example.
The teaser trailer also had me scratching my head, because I know that I've read Neuromancer, the novel by William Gibson that the show will be based on. I know that I've read it, but can't remember a thing about it, which means it's easily been long enough to get a re-read in without feeling over-familiar with the text.
I'm a hundred or so pages into that re-read, and having a great time with a novel that I actually bounced off slightly as a teenager, possibly because it's more sparsely written and deliberately unclear than I realised. What stood out in that first section most, though, was how some of the imagery in Apple's trailer seems extremely faithful to the novel, in the best way.
The first couple of chapters of the novel feature Case (the hacker played by Callum Turner in the show) basically realising that he's at rock bottom after a virtual heist gone bad. He's infected with a virus that means he can't surf cyberspace, and it's frankly baffling when he gets a job offer from a stranger called Molly.
She features pretty heavily in the trailer, complete with the mirrored eye implants that Gibson describes – like sunglass lenses grafted to her face. What really jumped out, though, is the moment when she unsheathes the nail-knives she has implanted in her fingers.
Gibson says they're like little scalpels, and they underline the fact that she's not some damsel or maiden, but a threat in her own right. In the teaser, that brief moment when Molly (Briana Middleton) shows off her knives looks incredibly faithful to how Gibson wrote it.
That's what any fan of the novel will be hoping, of course – whenever a big-money adaptation like this is announced, the fear is that it'll trample all over the source material or use it to jump off into its own stories. Apple's track record is really good on that front, but this teaser has me thinking it's about to put another feather in its already full sci-fi cap.
