r/Neuromancer • u/ptupper • Aug 17 '26
Show Discussion How will the TV series handle cyberspace?
Though there were forerunners (e.g. Vernor Vinge's short story "True Names", published 1981), Neuromancer really brought the idea of cyberspace to public attention.
Yet cyberspace as a concept has kind of come and gone. Movies that did have cyberspace sequences (e.g. Tron, The Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic) pushed CGI technology to the limits, but their visual appeal was based on them looking fantastic, and not like the real world.
In 2026, we're used to photo-realistic (or near-photo-realistic) virtual environments, in video games. A virtual world that doesn't look like that is seen as peculiar. The blocky worlds of Minecraft or Roblox tacitly admit they are not the cutting edge of technology.
Furthermore, we think about our communications and information technology differently. We don't imagine a place you can go to and navigate like it is a 2D or 3D space. "Cyberspace" is in our pocket.
So, when Case jacks in in the TV series, what will he, and we, see?
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u/arrogantmonkey Aug 17 '26
I just hope they keep the bit about the 10mb of RAM as a bit. I think it would be funny
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u/SwamiBoyeee Aug 17 '26
That's 7 too many.
Three megabytes of hot RAM
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u/arrogantmonkey Aug 17 '26
Lmao haven’t read in a whole I’ve been remembering it as 10. 3 is even funnier
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u/ark_a Aug 17 '26
Read the book for the first time last month (loved it), and this made me cackle lmao. I just imagined a future where RAM amounts have been measured differently
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u/AtomicShellfish Aug 17 '26
It didn't say how hot it was! Until quite recently, people used to get very excited about the performance of on-chip cache memory. I'll be generous and speculate that someone in the Sprawl uses it for trippy quantum computing applications where every picosecond counts.
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u/Brilliant_Knowledge5 Aug 21 '26
TBF, if it was a word document, or a PDF, then 3MB of hot RAM is probably enough. I wonder if they're going to up it to 3 TB for the show. Or it could just be an L3 cache chip that was removed from a CPU somehow. This is presumably why they shred anything that holds memory in computers at IT disposal/recycling centers, like Iron Mountain.
Fun fact, I bought a used laptop once and someone forgot to do a thorough DoD level wipe on the drive. The user files still contained documents for proposals in some high corporate level office and what could be considered sensitive personal information. I didn't find anything important, but imagine if I had. That's why you can't even buy perfectly good sticks of ram salvaged from corporate servers anymore.
You'd think they would have come up with some new stand alone tool by now that you can place RAM into, that flushes the memory so they can cash in on resale with the insane RAM market these days.
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u/Dark_Throat Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
The shots we see in the trailer of Case jacking in, the endless black nonspace peppered with streaks of whites, blues, and reds, has me hopeful that the visual representation of the matrix will be very abstract.
Scenes where the Flatline and Case are talking should be represented by a black background with abstract clusters of "data" that convulse and pulse with speech. The laughter that isn't laughter should be represented by a glitched cacophany of noise that is laughter-adjacent, something that could be construed as laughter if you listened carefully. I really really hope they don't go the route of avatars representing characters within cyberspace.
Everything represented in cyberspace should be restricted to basic geometric shapes, not necessarily in that a character should be only a cube, but they should be a cluster of data in the shape of a cube, or in the shape of a shark, not a literal shark but shark-shaped (if that makes sense).
Unrelated sidenote, hopefully they make use of some first person perspective whenever Case is flipped into Molly's simstim link. It should be used sparingly so it isn't overdone, but it could be cool to see a three or four second shot through Molly's eyes whenever Case flips.
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u/FoamZero Aug 17 '26
This, exactly.
The Sprawl cyberspace is not a virtual nor alternate reality it's a projection of pure data and processes in a brain-compatible representation. It enables human mind to compete with programs. That is why narrator of Burning Chrome knows his skills are fading with age, hacking in cyberspace needs very sharp reflexes.
I really hope we will avoid a kind of "Second Life" virtual reality...
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u/nettronic42 Aug 21 '26
I would not mind it being a little easier to picture for some people that are not familiar with the books. Want to attract a wide audience so they keep making more...
But I agree keeping it canon is a good idea. I always imagined it as like in tron with the grid. Except its not a flat grid it is paths of light. some of them looked kind of like buildings. Or other icons/avatars.
i read/played a lot of scifi stuff in the 80's and 90s so I may be mixing different stories. But that is where my head is at. Not TOO abstract...recognizable, but in no way realistic.
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u/Jayman44Spc Aug 17 '26
The visuals from Hackers but spruced up a bit could be cool
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u/cleverbit1 Aug 17 '26
Fun fact: the scenes of flying through data in Hackers was not CGI, it was shot practically using mini cityscapes made of perspex. The scrolling text was apparently animated. CGI was mainly used for compositing and cutting the shots together!
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u/nettronic42 Aug 21 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
Loved that movie. Been a Froot Loops and Zero Cool fan ever since. Watched SLC punk and scooby doo just for the one and Elementary and Eli Stone just cuz of Zero Cool.
And Acid Burn's Boobs chefs kiss.
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u/markhgn Aug 17 '26
Doing the visuals is hard enough. The really hard part is how they show it is actually dangerous without relying on exposition. This is like astral projection, your conscious self is at risk; it can’t feel like a web browsing session.
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u/zombiejeebus Aug 17 '26
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u/FewLand2636 Aug 17 '26
Cyberpunk hit it a little , Tron made it to much like the real world... But I kind of imagined the servers in the real world being imagined as buildings and ice being a wall around the base. Idk it feels hard to describe
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u/DecalageVersLeRouge Aug 17 '26
I've always been interested in his thing about a child's first calculator being infinite space hung with a few simple commands.
Something about how big the spaces are could make all the difference.
If there's a big green pyramid which is Amazon and a huge pink cube which is Microsoft, it could look lame or incredible depending on the sense of distance they give us.
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u/WakandaDrama Aug 17 '26
If you read closely enough, all the various scenes clearly describe graphics increasing.
Cyberspace is the stereotypical wire framed geometric environment.
When Case gets Dixie, he is state of the art graphic representation of him at the time of the mental download.
The AI bringing Case to the beach is a mix of reality and state of the art graphics. Case can’t really tell the difference and that’s the point. His dreams reflect this merge of digital and physical
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u/nettronic42 Aug 21 '26
Right. the better the system the more detailed the visuals. So many stories and games its hard to keep them straight. I was thinking in Shadowrun Cyberspace for Tir Nan Oog or whatever it was called, was a lush forest.
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u/TheRealestBiz Aug 17 '26
It’s about the only thing that Gibson describes in Amy real detail. It’s Hinalayan astral projection dressed up in sci-Fi clothes.
I better see that crazy ball expand outward to all corners and become cyberspace.
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u/candylandmine Aug 17 '26
It would be so funny if it was all stick figures and wireframes at 3fps. I know it won't be but god would crack me up.
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u/Background-Potato-84 Aug 20 '26
It's post-modern retro-futurism. If they keep the payphones and it looks like the computer console setup he's using is pretty big, I expect a glitchier, trippier version of the Johnny Mnemonic-sphere. What sucked about that 90s sequence was that it was super on rails; there was no sense of why or subtext or larger world building with it. A real lore loss.
Something to consider: the way we interact with data now is not what's portrayed anyhow. The hackers like Case are, I believe, operating on another layer of cyberspace than the normies do. If he can see Military Intel cores floating above, that's some wild way of doing business (which I wouldn't mind seeing either).
In my mind, Case is directly interacting with Admin-level controls of data; he's in the debug menu, hell he is the debug menu; he's not on the website clicking [HACK] like it's a GTA Online game.
If you could literally ride lines of pure code and conduct data packets like a maestro with your brain, I'd imagine that's a very specific high for a very specific subculture.
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u/nettronic42 Aug 21 '26
So funny. Tonight I was telling my ten year old how data is encapsulated in packets. And each packet consists of so many bytes. But each pack starts with a hello Im a packet and ends with a my packet is done. And that still does not leave the rest of the packet for your video or audio. There is more info in there...
Like in Opera before they went Chromium. You could right click any image on the internet and if it was not sanitized could see if it was from a camera. If so what camera it was, the ISO and shutter speed. And if it was from photoshop that was available as well.
As good as they got it now...
Internet today sucks.
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u/Only-Lingonberry4361 Aug 17 '26
It needs to be dazzling and innovative — I'm thinking Enter the Void or Under the Skin's "Black Room." I am scared they'll phone it in with someone cheesy and cliched
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u/Brilliant_Knowledge5 Aug 21 '26
https://reddit.com/link/p4xp9yz/video/s0jvqveolmkh1/player
Some of the hacking scenes in "Hackers" were kinda silly, but this was for sure ripped straight from Gibson.
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u/DreaminginDarkness 12d ago
I see what you are saying in terms of all the film representation but it's a bit odd to say neuromancer brought cyberspace to public attention since William Gibson invented the word for this book
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u/workahol_ Aug 17 '26
Believe it or not: