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It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

What can ya do?

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>Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.

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I've seen a few people complain that the first trailer for the Neuromancer TV show looks "too bright" or "too clean." I think the real difference is that they're consciously trying to avoid that Blade Runner aesthetic, which includes avoiding the "never get brighter than dusk" trope.
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As a note on this, I just reread Neuromancer, and the bulk majority of it takes place in places that are not “high tech/low life” locales. People remember Chiba City, but that’s chapter one, there’s a whole rest of the book after that.
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Very likely.

However, I see two problems with this: one, I think people are going to make comparisons to Matrix rather than Blade Runner, and judging from the trailer it looks a lot like a modern Matrix (understandably!). Second, Neuromancer starts with "the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" so the grey/"not sunny" look is kinda baked in and hard to avoid ;)

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My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
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Casablanca is a famous example of this too.

And LOTR, though in that case coming to it after reading Terry Pratchett was difficult for me (Pratchett didn't just copy its, or other, fantasy tropes, but send them up in an exceedingly clever way).

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Yeah, there’s a bunch of these. I really like finding these sorts of “ur-“ moments, the first time a way of doing things really crystallizes into something other practitioners can see. The Matrix is another one - that movie is the transition point from 90s cinema to the 2000s, and it’s a little clunky from a 2000s viewpoint, but if you look at everything that came before it, it’s so clearly a turning point.
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Stop trying to steal The Matrix. It was released in 1999, that's OUR movie. You get the sequels.
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I have escaped the Matrix [bits and bytes world]; But entered the Gastrics (juice) [ie flesh and bones world]
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I'd say if there even was a bump between 90s and 2000s it was not the matrix, it was Guy Ritchie. And then Gaspar Noe sealed that. Tarantino was having a smoke nearby.
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Having read LOTR many, many times before I ever started trying to read Pratchett, I can't read Pratchett. That's not a slam at Sir Terry; I'd just internalized Tolkien so much that it was beyond my ability to properly appreciate him.
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If you haven't tried it, Small Gods is frequently recommended as a standalone, and it's very far in subject matter from the early tolkien-parody rincewind/guards books.
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Many Pratchett books aren't riffs on Tolkien at all. Someone recommended Small Gods (excellent choice, and not a whiff of Elves or Dwarves there) but many other Pratchett books are genuinely good and not cheap shots at Tolkien.

I say give it another try.

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Tolkien, Pratchett … like Bach and Toploader?
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I'd say like Bach and Rossini. Rossini was perfectly aware of the form of traditional opera, but deliberately chose to engage with it in a much less reverent style.
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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

I think there was a case of a movie reviewer for some newspaper panning LOTR because of how "generic" and "derivative" it was. I don't know if that's true or an urban legend, though, but I can see it happening.

I also think its going to be a problem for the upcoming Neuromancer series. Unless they change a lot of things, the plot as written is practically cliche at this point, and a lot of it doesn't even make sense outside of the specific technological and political context of the time.

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I heard the story as attributed to Asimov: he was walking out of Hamlet when a fellow patron said, "I don't see what the big deal is. It was all just cliches strung together."
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It’s a bit like how the end point of the most wildly successful music is that you hear it on a loop in the grocery store
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I think that's actually just that me espresso.
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Same thing happened to Tolkien and fantasy literature.
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I read LOTR in the early 70s. There was nothing else like it then.
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