If there's one book that influenced my taste in music, style, art and everything else it must be
William Gibson's Neuromancer. I don't know how many times I have reread it. And still a shiver runs down my spine when I come across lines like
'The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.Words you can't express in a movie. You just
can not.

But obviously somebody is trying hard to do so. At
IMDB Neuromancer is announced for
2011.
I'm pretty skeptic about it. Back in 2007 it was already
a rumor - and we remember
Johnny Mnemonic? A great movie if you're into sci-fi trash (and I admit I am) - but it has
nothing not much in common with the short story by Gibson except for the names of the main characters. Keanu Reeves looks good, Takeshi Kitano is as cool as usual and that's it. The special effects are cheap and overdosed, the scenery could be taken out of a TV-Series produced in the early 90's.
But maybe there's hope. My favorite movie is based on a novel too. And
Ridley Scott did hell of a good job with
Blade Runner. , 27 years later the concept design is awesome. And I'm pretty sure, I'm not the only one who believes it was a visual milestone for cinematography.
Back in 1984 lots of the stuff described in Neuromancer sounded futuristic. With '
a mash of punk, technology, noir and metaphysics' the book was ahead of it's time.
Today
cyberpunk is surrounding us, is part of our daily life. We're so used to stay connected with people all over the world, twitter what we're doing (
even if we're in the middle of a bank robbery), and know what an
AI is.
So maybe - just maybe - it's already too late for Neuromancer to hit the big screen. And I'm only afraid that one of the books which had this great personal impact on me ends up as just another generic Soon-to-be-real-movie.