this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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I mentioned this movie already.
"Predestination." The book was written about the year 1975 AD in 1950s. They film makers made their 1975 conform to what the original writer imagined. I won't giver you a lot of details because it's the kind of science fiction that works better if you go in knowing very little.
The point is that I want 'retrofuture.' I want the writer's version of the future. I want the TVs to show grey static and people to be amazed by the idea of a computer virus.
In a similar way, a movie like 'The Great Gatsby' was based on a contemporary novel where the writer had a specific vision of how New York looked.
I see what you're saying, but I think sci-fi is in a bit of a different place there. Neuromancer is concerned with what's coming. It's not painting a 2000s of the 80s, it's painting the future of a present.
Predestination is a bit different in that it's a time travel story. In Neuromancer (or Blade Runner, for that matter) the technology is not about extrapolating technology, it's about extrapolating society.
It's not impossible for sci-fi to be coded to a time. I don't think you could make Strange Days today, it's so ingrained into the idea of the end of the millenium and the rise of the Internet. It'd be different even if you kept the setting. A nostalgic look back instead of an anxious look forward.
Neuromancer has the same problem, only on top of everything else it's also just vaguely futuristic, so it's not like the 80s look and feel is integral to the story (in case the endless rehashes of the stories for the past forty years hadn't proven that).
We'll see. The worst case scenario is we're thinking this through more than the people making the actual thing.
The first line is 'the television colored sky.' Gibson talks about how that went from grey static to bright blue to black. Seeing as how we've already surpassed a lot of the book's future, I think the film makers should embrace it and make a show that looks like it was made in the 1980s looking at a bizarre future.
On a related note; "Stand On Zanzibar" was written in 1968 and won the Hugo for best science fiction novel. It was set in the early 21st Century and is being republished because of how well the author predicted the future. You might want to give it a read.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/stand-on-zanzibar-john-brunner/7252770?ean=9781250781222&next=t