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. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.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. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad.įlynne and Wilf are about to meet one another.

He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter.

Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby.īurton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop.

Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. The New York Times bestselling author of Neuromancer and Agency presents a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that takes a terrifying look into the future.įlynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid.

William gibson the jackpot trilogy