Hamburg Noir

PULP TO FILM

Neuromancer

PULP
Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984)

FILM
Neuromancer (Apple TV, 2026)

William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic is a hardboiled pulp set in a dystopian future. After decades of broken promises, it’s coming to your screen soon. Honest.

Neuromancer won the Philip K. Dick Award for best original science fiction novel of 1984, but Gibson explicitly modeled the story on the hardboiled detective templates of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the 1930s and 1940s. His protagonist, Case, is an updated version of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, a “cowboy” and “detective” manipulated into violating his own admittedly crude moral code. Molly, the femme fatal “razorgirl” who recruits him, is named after the “molls” of 1940s film noir. And her employer is a suave, shadowy figure named Armitage.

Like Marlowe, Case is a small-time operator reaching for the big money, this time on the mean streets of Chiba City, Japan:

A thief, he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.

Like many anti-heroes of film noir, Case crosses the line one fatal time -- and pays dearly:

He’d made the classic mistake, the one he’d sworn he’d never make. He stole from his employers.... He’d expected to die, then, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because -- still smiling -- they were going to make sure he never worked again.

His punishment brings to mind David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which was released two years later:

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.

It’s also an excellent example of the crime, guilt, and punishment motif that defines film noir.

When Molly finds Case in a claustrophobic but secure “coffin” room in “Cheap Hotel,” he’s a suicidal speed addict who has hit bottom, taking ridiculous risks as a fence in the well-named Night City:

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.... Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.

Despite Molly’s high-tech enhancements -- surgically inset glasses that seal her eye sockets and scalpel blades that slide out from under her fingernails -- her attitude is pure noir, on display when she saves Case from a loan shark and his enforcers. “Molly had grinned at Case’s side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them to make a move.”

Back in the coffin, Molly tells Case that Armitage will provide him with a cure to his nerve damage in exchange for unnamed services. As a dead-ender with nothing to lose, Case has already “started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire.” He agrees to the deal.

In a luxurious Hilton Hotel room overlooking Tokyo Bay, Case meets Armitage, who face appears inhumanly perfect. “The handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade’s leading media faces.” Armitage’s first words are even less comforting. “We invented you in Siberia, Case.” The young hacker doesn’t know it yet, but Armitage is referring to his own disastrous military mission years before.

The next day, in a “nameless, expensively appointed” clinic, Case gets a new pancreas and “plugs in his liver.” The doctors also implant slowly dissolving sacks of the Russian mycotoxin in his body. If he doesn’t do exactly as Armitage says, he will, in effect, end up back in Memphis.

Like many hardboiled characters before them, Case and Molly don’t blindly follow orders, they investigate their employer, who is blackmailing them both. They discover that Armitage is actually Colonel Willis Corto, the sole survivor of a failed Cold War mission, "Screaming Fist," in the former Soviet Union. After undergoing extensive reconstructive surgery, Corto discovers that the U.S. Government knew his mission would fail but sent him in anyway. He subsequently kills his handler and disappears into the criminal underworld, eventually resurfacing as Armitage, with ties to the Yakusa.

As a first step in Armitage’s plan, Case is forced to steal a “firmware construct” of his late mentor, McCoy Pauly. Instead of dwelling on the technical details, Gibson, who freely admits that he knows next to nothing about technology, just moves on to other constructs, all dead friends of Case, who join the makeshift team.

One is “the Finn,” who is as much old school as high-tech:

He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a torn package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of Partagas.

Finn is the one who explains to Case what is behind Armitage’s plan. “Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. Bern. It’s got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of ‘53.”

Armitage orders Case, Molly, and the Finn go to Istanbul and team up with a psychopath named Riviera, who leads them to Wintermute, a less-than-kosher AI created by an eccentric family named Tessier-Ashpool in the Villa Straylight on Freeside, a cylindrical space resort for the wealthy. Freeside has the gothic sci-fi feel of the paintings and drawings in The History of the Future: Images of the 21st Century as well as the “astronauting in retro space” artwork of Frank Moth.

It turns out that Wintermute has a twin AI, named Neuromancer. Both have been programmed with a need to merge with each other. In a wonderful historical twist, Gibson names the law enforcement agency that tries to prevent such mergers the “Turing cops.” In the early 1940s, Alan Turing led Hut 8 in Bletchy Park, which broke German naval cryptanalysis.

Thanks to the severe restrictions placed on AIs by the “Turing Registry,” Wintermute and Neuromancer need human intervention to achieve their union. Wintermute forces Case to break through the software barriers around Neuromancer. The sicko Riviera is tasked with getting the digital key to accessing Neuromancer from Lady 3Jane, the only cloned Tessier-Ashpool on site who is not in cryonic preservation at the moment.

At this point, Armitage, comes apart at the seams, believing that he is back in Screaming Fist. Wintermute, who originally manipulated then-Corto to create the Armitage persona, ends up ejecting him into space when he becomes violently unstable, leaving Case and Molly to the tender mercies of Riviera. Ever the psycho, Riviera betrays the team and helps Lady 3Jane and Hideo, her ninja bodyguard, capture and torture Molly.

In Chandleresque fashion, Gibson attempts to tie together all these impossibly lose ends at once. He’s not entirely successful, but that’s not the point. Like Chandler, he intentionally creates an intricate story with wild twists and turns, prioritizing atmosphere and character interaction over plot coherence.

Although the story is ostensible about the future, if feels like the present because Gibson doesn’t explain anything, assuming that it is your present. This demonstrates a remarkable respect for readers. It can also make for difficult reading because you are forced to connect the dots in your head. When you do, you get these “aha” moments. Oh, that’s what he meant. As a result, the book is more enjoyable each time you read it.

In addition, Gibson often talks about technology by describing its opposite, such as the bartender Ratz:

His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined around for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.

At one point, Ratz tells Case: “Listen to the fear. Maybe it’s your friend.” You don’t get more hardboiled than that.

Finally, Gibson mixes past, present, and future into delicious contradictions. For example, one of Case’s mentors, Julius Deane, is 135 years old. “His primary hedge against ageing was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA,” but “his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to ... meticulous reconstructions of garments of the previous century.” He “affected prescription glasses” and sucked on ginger bonbons “wrapped in blue and white checkered paper.” After Deane betrays Case, Molly takes care of business, handing Case “a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger” without comment.

Case has numerous flashbacks -- the functional equivalent of noir voiceover -- of his former girlfriend Linda Lee, who may or may not be dead. She reappears throughout the story, although it’s not clear whether it’s her or a construct used by Wintermute to manipulate Case, underlining the connection between retro sci-fi and hardboiled crime fiction.

Molly is the only character -- other than Ratz -- who doesn’t betray Case. In the end, she disappears, leaving him a handwritten note, just like her predecessors on the Silver Screen.

Although there have been a number of proposed film adaptations of Neuromancer, none have gone anywhere good. In 1995, Sony Pictures made an unfitting film adaptation of Johnny Mneumonic, a Gibson short story that introduced the Molly character and a Case equivalent. The studio took a screenplay by Gibson and tried to turn it into an blockbuster action movie with Keanu Reeves in the lead role, with predictably bad results. Not surprisingly, Gibson wanted nothing to do with the final cut.

In 2025, Apple TV began shooting a 10-part miniseries of Neuromancer with with Callum Turner as Case, Briana Middleton as Molly, and Mark Strong as Armitage. Hopefully, the film makers will combine the hardboiled plot with a Blade Runner set, rather than getting too “creative” like their predecessors. We’ll see.