The novel is, admittedly, pretty tedious, and the television version takes far less time to get to the meat of the story’s political intrigue. The basic speculative conceit of the novel is conveyed more quickly and efficiently, at the cost of some intrigue but with the addition of some fun action-adventure beats. To begin with, its opening episodes are far more digestible than the first third of Gibson’s novel, thanks to the convenience of visual storytelling. There’s a lot about The Peripheral that works. If Westworld didn’t do the trick, The Peripheral won’t be doing it either. It’s a potential mess of temporal mechanics made simple thanks to a contrivance that makes literal the old adage that “the past is another country.” This also allows the story to work as a polemic about imperialism, as the ruling class of the future sees Flynne’s present as just another resource-rich territory to plunder.
Meanwhile, in her present, Flynne, her war veteran brother Burton (Jack Reynor), and the rest of their community cope with increasingly frequent and violent interventions from the future. The series is produced by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, co-creators of HBO’s Westworld, which seemed for a hot second like it might popularize cyberpunk for mass audiences the way Game of Thrones revitalized medieval fantasy. The latest attempt at adapting Gibson debuts this weekend on Amazon Prime: The Peripheral, based upon the first novel in his still-ongoing Jackpot Trilogy. It was last reported in 2017 to be under development at Fox, which is now under new management.) (A film of Neuromancer itself has been in development hell for decades.
To date, Gibson’s novels and short stories have been only sparsely adapted, and never to much success. This goes double for the works of William Gibson, one of the most celebrated and influential figures in cyberpunk who codified the genre in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer.
And yet, save for the world-shaking success of The Matrix (1999) and the fairly one-note anthology series Black Mirror, most attempts by Hollywood to translate cyberpunk ideas and aesthetic to the screen have been either commercial or critical failures, if not both. As technology becomes more integrated into our daily lives, cyberpunk-the sci-fi subgenre that’s been preoccupied with the seemingly inevitable singularity of flesh and machine since before we had a term for it-remains our present’s most relevant branch of speculative fiction.
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