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 template built by Raymond Chandler half a century earlier. It was Gibson’s first novel. He wrote the story on a mechanical typewriter and published it the same year Steve Jobs released the Apple Macintosh to the general public.

The opening line sets the noir stage: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Gibson is referring to analog TVs, which, back in the day, showed “snow” when channels were turned off for the night.

His protagonist, Henry Dorsett Case, is an updated version of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, a “cowboy” manipulated into violating his own crude moral code. Molly Millions, 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, a shabby private detective “calling on four million dollars” in West Hollywood circa 1939, 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 once 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.

When Molly finds Case in a claustrophobic but secure “coffin” room in Cheap Hotel, he’s a suicidal speed addict who’s hit bottom, taking ridiculous risks as a fence in a particularly dangerous part of town:

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.

In a line that could have come from Chandler, Gibson tells us that Case has “started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire.”

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 also pure noir, on display when she saves Case from a loan shark and his enforcers: “Molly ... 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 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” black-market hospital, Case gets a new pancreas from one of Chiba’s “clinic tanks of spare parts” and “plugs in his liver” that “bypass” the amphetamines he’s been taking. The doctors also implant slowly dissolving sacks of the original Russian mycotoxin in his body. If he doesn’t do exactly as Armitage says, he will, in effect, end up back in Memphis.

When Case and Molly return to Cheap Hotel, the inevitable happens: the femme fatal seduces the wounded protagonist. “She touched his shoulder. ‘Roll over. I give a good massage.’” With that, Molly takes matters into her own hands. Case doesn’t object. They become lovers in a scene that definitely would not have passed the Hayes Code, which censored Hollywood films between 1934 and 1968. But this moment of intimacy seals their alliance in good noir tradition.

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 covert mission, “Screaming Fist,” in the former Soviet Union. After undergoing extensive reconstructive surgery, Corto finds out that the brass knew in advance that his mission would fail but sent him in anyway. As one of Case’s associates puts it: “Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology.” Corto subsequently kills his handler and disappears into the criminal underworld, eventually resurfacing as Armitage, with business ties to the yakuza.

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.

When Cased gets a cryptic message -- “W I N T E R M U T E” -- the Finn explains it to him: “Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. Bern. It’s got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of ‘53.”

Case soon discovers that Wintermute is a less-than-kosher artificial intelligence system created by an eccentric family named Tessier-Ashpool and that it has a twin named Neuromancer. The two AIs have been programmed to merge with each other, despite strict laws that prohibit such a dangerous union.

In a wonderful historical twist, Gibson calls 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 cracked the German navy’s Enigma code. Then, in 1949, he developed the Turing test (aka the imitation game), which tested a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human.

As Case explains to Molly, most AIs are military. They produce the “ice” that protects the databases he used to crack with “icebreaker” viruses. For him, the Turing cops are just “bad heat.”

This unhealthy dynamic leads to bizarre gangland exchanges like this between Case and Wintermute’s Finn construct:

“You killed those Turings.”

The Finn shrugged. “Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they woulda offed you and never thought twice.”

Such scenes are more frightening four decades later, amid reports of AIs rewriting their own code to avoid being shut down. Greetings from HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Thanks to the severe restrictions placed on AIs by Gibson’s fictional “Turing Registry,” Wintermute and Neuromancer need human intervention to achieve their union. To this end, Armitage orders Case, Molly, and the Finn to team up with a psychopath named Riviera, a “compulsive Judas,” who leads them to the Tessier-Ashpool’s 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 and the “astronauting in retro space” artwork of Frank Moth.

Once inside the villa, Case is forced to break through the software barriers around the second rogue AI. Meanwhile, Riviera is tasked with getting its passcode from Lady 3Jane, the only cloned Tessier-Ashpool on site who is not in cryonic preservation.

At this critical juncture, Armitage comes apart at the seams, believing he’s back in Screaming Fist. Wintermute, who originally manipulated then-Corto to create the Armitage persona, ejects him into space, 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 “play with” Molly.

In Chandleresque fashion, Gibson attempts to tie together his impossibly loose ends at the end. He’s not entirely successful, but that’s not the point. Like Chandler -- who readily admitted that one of his plots didn’t make sense -- he creates an intricate story with wild twists and turns, prioritizing atmosphere and character interaction over plot coherence.

Although Neuromancer is ostensibly about the future, it feels like the present because Gibson doesn’t bother explaining technology or terminology, assuming that they’re part of your present. By forcing you to live in his imagined future, he shows a remarkable level of respect, treating you as an adult. This can make for strenuous reading. You are often forced to connect the dots on your own in real time. When you do, you get these “aha” moments. Oh, that’s what he meant. As a result, the book is more enjoyable on a second or third reading.

In addition, Gibson often talks about new technology by describing its opposite, such as the physical reconstruction of Case’s alter ego, 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 (“Jule”) 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 and hallucinations -- the functional equivalent of noir voiceover -- in which he sees his former girlfriend Linda Lee, who betrayed him to escape Night City. She reappears throughout the story, although it’s not clear whether it’s really 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 is loyal to Case. But, in the end, she breaks his heart, leaving him a handwritten note, like a classic moll on the silver screen. Case’s response is worthy of Marlowe: “I never even found out what colour her eyes were. She never showed me.”

Although there have been a number of proposed film adaptations of Neuromancer, until now, none have gone anywhere. In 1995, Sony Pictures made a film out of Johnny Mneumonic, the Gibson short story that introduced the Molly character and a Case equivalent.

It should have been easy with such pitch-perfect voiceover lines:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.

Instead, the studio tried to turn Gibson’s screenplay into an blockbuster action movie with Keanu Reeves in the lead role. Not surprisingly, Gibson wanted nothing to do with the final cut.

In 2025, Apple TV began shooting a ten-part miniseries, based on the so-called Sprawl trilogy, which includes Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The series was co-written by Graham Roland and J.D. Dillard. It stars Callum Turner as Case, Briana Middleton as Molly, and Mark Strong as Armitage. Hopefully, this new team of filmmakers will combine the hardboiled plot with a Blade Runner set, rather than getting too “creative” like their predecessors.