Having re-watched Johnnie Mnemonic recently I was struck how the film had morphed from the short story/novella and considering that the screenplay was written by Gibson. I wonder what (apart from film considerations) made him change the storyline. The opening scene in the book is matched in the film with some slight alterations but the whole Pharmakem and the ‘cure’ got stapled on. The Loteks were fun and matched my mental image from the book. They struck me as a group that wouldn’t have been out-of-place in Serenity working with/for Mr. Universe.
Certainly JM seemed to be a better match for The Sprawl than my original thought of Neuromancer/Sprawl trilogy. I’m going to re-watch the Matrix series to see how that might affect my visualisation regarding the game.
Do you think it’s that Neuromancer feels like more of an “epic level” version of cyberpunk story… much more experienced characters, loftier goals, spaceships in orbit, etc? Whereas Johnnie Mnemonic is more street-level… everything is in one small dirty corner of the sprawl, the characters mostly small-time players…
Probably. Neuromancer felt more hard scifi compared to JM which came across more as a thriller with chrome. I could easily see JM in a Noir setting whereas I couldn’t pigeonhole Neuromancer into the same niche.
The rest of the short stories in Burning Chrome that formed the core of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy are a good touchstone as well. They’re often pretty allusive, but they get at the role of operatives as pawns in games of corporate espionage.
The Sprawl trilogy itself is much more of a set of personal open world stories. Although just about everything involving Turner in Count Zero is also heavily influential for me.
I spent the afternoon rereading CZ as it’s been a few years since I last went through the trilogy. Turner is interesting and the plot isn’t revolving around the frequent Leading Man and Love Interest tag-along trope even when the tag-along is someone like Molly. The double-crossing and changes of allegiance of Conroy and some of the other characters made for an interesting change of pace. The loas/AI gave another twist on how the human mind justifies what it see or thinks it sees/hears.