Before Apple TV’s ‘Neuromancer,’ One William Gibson Story Is the Perfect Starting Point

Published Nov 3, 2026, 6:06 AM EST

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If you want to try to understand cyberpunk as a genre, or as a sub-genre of science fiction, there’s use in just jumping into William Gibson’s body of work, since his earlier works are all definitive and influential as pieces of cyberpunk fiction. You can go back further than Neuromancer, which was Gibson’s first novel, to see other books that might be cyberpunk in nature, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which later got adapted as Blade Runner. But Neuromancer is heightened with all the expected things, like technology being advanced and everywhere despite societal inequality, people existing between reality and some kind of cyber realm, and the world as a whole feeling dystopian, even with all the advances that, on paper, sound great.

Neuromancer is being adapted into a TV series that’s set to air in early 2027 on Apple TV, so there is a certain logic to the idea that if you want to prepare for it, reading or re-reading the book of the same name is worth doing. Yet “Burning Chrome,” which is a short story compiled in the 1986 short story collection of the same name, was first written before Neuromancer, and it works as a prequel of sorts to that novel, plus the other two books in Gibson’s fairly loose Sprawl trilogy (Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). It might not be essential in the manner you'd expect, though, and all these stories by William Gibson can be intentionally hard to follow on their own, while bleeding into each other in more obscure or thematic ways (the Sprawl trilogy is not a conventional narrative one, by any means). But you do get a certain understanding of Gibson's style and that cyberpunk feel from "Burning Chrome," so it's worth tackling on that front.

What Happens in "Burning Chrome"

Image via Arbor House

So, the plot of “Burning Chrome” is a little challenging to break down, and that’s something that can be said about most of William Gibson’s stories. But it’s shorter than his novels, and there are fewer opportunities to get completely lost as a result, so this much can be said: it’s about a pair of hackers in the future who use their skills to pull off heists, in effect. Hacker heists, cyberheists, whatever you want to call it. Hell, it’s kind of relevant as a concept, what with that recent (at the time of writing) Binance hack and everything.

It's most important for having some minor characters introduced or mentioned who are later part of the Sprawl trilogy, and then it’s an introduction to the setting of that trilogy.

Anyway, they target some mobsters, and they also get involved with a young woman, and that gives the whole story (and especially the ending) something of a film noir flavor. You don’t need to hit noir tropes or conventions throughout a sci-fi story to make it cyberpunk necessary, but it definitely helps, and William Gibson is undeniably great at doing sci-fi noir, or tech noir, or whatever you'd like to call it. Back to “Burning Chrome,” though, it’s most important for having some minor characters introduced or mentioned who are later part of the Sprawl trilogy, and then it’s an introduction to the setting of that trilogy, too.

How "Burning Chrome" Leads Into 'Neuromancer'

“Burning Chrome” is, importantly, the first of Gibson’s stories to be set in the Sprawl, and that’s the setting, unsurprisingly, of the Sprawl trilogy. So, you get a feel for the world, some of the people and organizations who hold power in it, and how people who are willing to break the law might thrive in such a world, and it’s a gentler entry point to William Gibson than Neuromancer. Both “Burning Chrome” and Neuromancer are dense for sure, and not the easiest books in the world to follow, but there are more things going on in Neuromancer all at once, with “Burning Chrome,” even with the density, being digestible at about 25 pages in length.

You can get through something like that in about an hour, or if you want to understand everything (like, good luck), then sure, taking your time and really trying to absorb every line will mean spending more than an hour on it… unless you just live and breathe this kind of science fiction and/or you're very smart. “Burning Chrome” is the best way, in any event, to get a handle on the dystopian/cyberpunk world that gets fleshed out further in Neuromancer and beyond, so for that introduction to a style and a certain vibe, it’s a good starting point. In some ways, even if they're a bit abstract, it’s a good stepping stone to the rest of Gibson’s Sprawl books.

The Challenges of Adapting a Book Like 'Neuromancer'

Image via S.F. Masterworks

Burning Chrome is the short story collection where you can access, you know, “Burning Chrome,” the short story. It’s also home to some other stories that might be familiar if you're more into movies than literature, since two stories were adapted into movies. So, adapting Gibson can technically be done, but doing it well might be a different story. “Johnny Mnemonic” became the 1995 film of the same name (Keanu Reeves in a cyberpunk film a few years before the original The Matrix), but it wasn’t really a beloved movie… it has something of a cult following, though, for what it’s worth. And then “New Rose Hotel” also became a movie of the same name, but the less said about that strange and honestly quite annoying film, the better.

That doesn’t bode too well for Neuromancer (2027), but maybe the TV format will help, compared to trying to do William Gibson in a feature film. His style is such that a direct adaptation of Neuromancer will be difficult (though never say never), but something inspired by Neuromancer, channeling the interesting energy it has into a slightly different narrative, or just something a bit heavier on narrative? It could work. It’ll probably be interesting, at the very least, and if you are yourself interested but find Neuromancer (the novel) a bit intimidating to leap into, “Burning Chrome” (plus some of the other stories in the Burning Chrome collection) might well be a better place to start.

Neuromancer

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  Henry Case

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  Briana Middleton

  Molly

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  Mark Strong

  Armitage

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  John Ashpool