Enlarge / A cover image for Neuromancer included in Apple's press release. (credit: Apple)

It's been a long time coming: A TV series adapted from the famed William Gibson novel Neuromancer will air on Apple TV+. The streamer ordered 10 episodes.

The order comes after decades of failed attempts to greenlight a screen adaptation of the 1984 science fiction novel. The most recent widely known failed attempt was by Deadpool director Tim Miller in 2017.

The series will be helmed by showrunner, writer, and producer Graham Roland, who until now was best known as the creator of the AMC TV series Dark Winds and for helming the series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime Video. Roland will share a co-creator credit on Neuromancer with J.D. Dillard, a TV writer known for his work on the recent Twilight Zone reboot series.

Enlarge / Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Flynne Fisher, a young woman who may or may not have witnessed a real murder. (credit: Prime Video)

Sci-fi legend William Gibson's 2014 densely layered novel The Peripheral ingeniously combines elements of noir murder mystery, time travel, and the author's trademark cyberpunk futurism. It's those features that make the novel so challenging to adapt for television, but Prime Video managed to pull off that feat with its new nine-episode series, The Peripheral , starring Chloë Grace Moretz.

(Minor spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

There are obviously some key divergences from the source material, as befits a TV adaptation. But as with Gibson's novel, there are two plot lines that eventually begin to converge in the series. The first arc takes place in our near-term future and is centered on a young woman named Flynne (Moretz). Flynne works at the local 3D-printing shop in a small town. Flynne's brother Burton (Jack Reynor) is a veteran of the US Marine Corps' elite Haptic Recon force and suffers from brain trauma resulting from his cybernetic implants. Burton works security for a video game/virtual world maintained by a company called Milagros Coldiron. Flynne sometimes substitutes for Burton, and one day, he asks her to try a new kind of headset that introduces her to a virtual reality so vivid, it seems like she's really there. The twist: She actually is "there," but "there" isn't where, or when, she thinks it is.

A young woman struggling to hold it together in small-town America finds herself witness to what may or may not be a murder in the first teaser for The Peripheral , a new Prime Video series based on William Gibson's 2014 novel of the same name.

(Spoilers for the novel below.)

The novel is in many ways vintage Gibson: a bleak, dystopian future world chock-full of big thematic ideas, visionary technology, and its own slang terminology. The reader is plunged into this setting and must acclimate accordingly; Gibson isn't interested in presenting everything to us on a silver platter. But that initial effort pays off as the novel evolves into an action-packed cyberpunk thriller.