It felt pretty good to wake up this morning and hear all this news. As I made my coffee, I thought back on those times when I was writing Cain and despairing no one would want to play it. These awards, as well as its solid placement in the Interactive Fiction Competition, are truly gratifying.
If you’ve not played According to Cain, you can read more at its home page, which includes links for downloading it or playing it in your browser.
Quick note: If you’re an aficionado of interactive fiction, and you played at least one interactive fiction game released in 2022, head on over to the Interactive Fiction Database and vote for the IFDB Award. There’s a lot of categories, but no fear, you can vote in as many or as few of them as you like.
(With one proviso: You can only vote in the “Author’s Choice” categories if you’ve authored an interactive fiction game and it’s listed on IFDB.)
You may have also heard something similar ten or so years ago (such as this 2013 news story). Why are we going through this again in 2023?
You may also wonder how a character created in 1887—136 years ago—could have been copyrighted up until a few days back. Did all those recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations (Sherlock, Elementary, Mr. Holmes, Enola Holmes, etc.) pay a license fee to someone? Who was collecting the money?
The character of Sherlock Holmes, and most of his stories, have been in the public domain since the late 1990’s. However, Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary estate—which represents a few distant descendants—continued to insist that the character remained in copyright, and so authors and filmmakers kept paying a license fee to produce derivative works. The final batch of Holmes stories entered the public domain in 2023, but it remains to be seen if the estate will cease to claim it holds rights to depictions of him.
And, no, I did not purchase a license to publish my book last year. Here’s why.
Of the books I’ve written, A Man Named Baskerville required the most research. I studied Victorian idioms and writing patterns, the history of the Empire of Brazil, the British peerage, dog breeding and training, and the ecosystem of the Dartmoor bogs. I read and reread (and reread) the source story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. None of this was a chore.
However, I also spent a frustrating amount of time researching whether I needed to pay a license fee to publish my book. That research drew out to a confounding and depressing study in modern greed.
This is what I learned:
In the United States, the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have been in the public domain for decades now. The earliest Holmes stories fell out of copyright in 1998, when U.S. legislation declared works published prior to 1923 were automatically in the public domain. That magic year—1923—was “frozen” until 2019, when the public-domain clock began moving forward. Today, the magic public domain cut-off date is 1927.
(This is an important distinction: The characters of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, etc. were placed in the public domain in 1998, even though some of the later stories remained under copyright. As you’ll see, the Doyle literary estate played up this confusion for their own ends.)
The first Sherlock Holmes stories were published in 1887. The bulk of them were published prior to 1923. You’d think authors and filmmakers have been free for decades now to produce new Sherlock Holmes works. You would be wrong, in a way.
The complication stems from Doyle’s writing history. Although he killed off Holmes in 1893’s “The Final Problem,” he returned to the character in The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialized in 1901–1902) and brought the detective back to life in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House.” Doyle continued producing Holmes stories and novels until 1927—meaning he produced four years’ worth of work that remained copyrighted though the end of 2022.
Astoundingly, the Doyle literary estate did not stop insisting after 1998 that depictions of Sherlock Holmes required a license. Their logic was that since some of the Sherlock Holmes stories remained copyrighted, the estate still held rights to the character. What’s more, they asserted any depiction of a “rounded” Sherlock Holmes—that is, a Sherlock Holmes with feelings—was also copyrighted. (It’s preposterous, and I won’t go into their reasoning here.)
These specious claims crashed into a wall of common sense thanks to author Leslie S. Klinger suing the estate in 2013. Klinger had previously paid a $5,000 licensing fee to publish his first Sherlock Holmes book. He refused to pay for his second book; the Doyle estate threatened to prevent the book’s distribution. Judge Richard Posner recounted the estate’s threats in his findings:
[The estate] did not mince words … “If you proceed … to bring out [the sequel] unlicensed, do not expect to see it offered for sale by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and similar retailers. We work with those compan[ies] routinely to weed out unlicensed uses of Sherlock Holmes from their offerings, and will not hesitate to do so with your book as well.”
Posner excoriated Doyle’s estate, calling their actions “a form of extortion”:
The Doyle estate’s business strategy is plain: charge a modest license fee for which there is no legal basis, in the hope that the “rational” writer or publisher asked for the fee will pay it rather than incur a greater cost, in legal expenses, in challenging the legality of the demand.
Posner also tossed out the estate’s attempt to extend their copyright via the last remaining stories, as well as their “Sherlock Holmes with feeling” claim. He said their appeal “bordered on the quixotic.”
This is why, when the suit was settled, news sources in 2013—ten years ago—were printing headlines like “Finally, Sherlock Holmes Is Now in the Public Domain.” Considering Posner’s scathing dressing-down of the estate, you’d think the matter was settled. Again, you would be wrong.
Unabated and shameless, the Doyle literary estate continued to squeeze payments from authors and filmmakers. One victim of this bogus “Sherlock Holmes with feeling” copyright was the 2015 film Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellan. Another was the Netflix production of Enola Holmes. The final 2020 settlement details are undisclosed, but I wager Netflix paid the Doyle estate rather than continue with a protracted lawsuit—exactly the shakedown Posner described in his Klinger decision.
With the passing of 2022, articles blossom again with proclamations that the master detective is finally in the public domain—“Now anybody can write a Sherlock Holmes story.” Actually, anybody could have written a Holmes story since 1998—it’s only due to an insufferable and insatiable literary estate that anyone would think otherwise.
Mr. Holmes movie poster
With the entire Sherlock Holmes corpus now in the public domain, this must close the door on the estate’s claims, right? I’m dubious. The Doyle estate has been told at least twice in the past (in 1998, again in 2013) they do not hold a copyright on the detective. That did not stop them from abusing their namesake’s prestige to squeeze money out of creators.
If you think I’m being cynical, consider that the estate continues, in 2023, to solicit license fees from prospective Holmes authors. A separate agency solicits licenses for Sherlock Holmes memorabilia and merchandise—even though generic depictions of the detective are entirely in the public domain and do not require a license. The literary estate’s web site is polished and professionally-produced. You could not blame a naive author wandering onto it and concluding they must pay a license fee to publish a Sherlock Holmes book.
And if you think I was being paranoid or overly self-important worrying that the Doyle estate would come after me, recall that they were more than happy to take Leslie Klinger—an independent author you may not have heard of before—all the way to the 7th Circuit court of appeals. Remember what they told him: “Do not expect to see [your book] offered for sale by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and similar retailers. We work with those companies routinely to weed out unlicensed uses of Sherlock Holmes.” Would Amazon’s algorithm automatically ban or blacklist my book because it did not carry a license from the Doyle estate?
And if that sounds farfetched, know that several years ago Amazon informed me that they would de-list my first novel because its description contained the phrase “Star Wars.” They didn’t care that my novel centers on the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics. I removed the phrase from my description, and the book continues to be sold online. I’m not happy about that, though.
With all that in mind, I decided to risk it. The strength of the Klinger decision convinced me the Doyle estate did not hold the copyright to Sherlock Holmes, that I didn’t need to obtain a license, that I didn’t need to wait until 2023 to publish A Man Named Baskerville—that I was entirely free to take the original Baskerville story and re-shape and re-imagine it from the perspective of the villain himself. That’s exactly what I did.
White Noise is not the kind of book one associates with popular entertainment, nor its author as the kind of person to acquiesce to its adaptation.
This merely touches the surface of my reaction to Netflix’s latest project.
If you’re not familiar, the novel White Noise is a 1985 literary comedy about Jack Gladney, a “professor of Hitler studies,” and his nuclear family in a fictional Midwestern college town. The early chapters depict suburban life as one soaked in crass consumerism, commercialism, and the ubiquitous nature of mass media. Things go pear-shaped when a railroad car spill on the edge of town triggers an “airborne toxic event,” leading to an evacuation and the concomitant strain on the family unit.
Remember, this is branded a comedy. The comic thrust of White Noise comes from its supposedly scathing parodies of American middle-class life. Take the novel’s opening paragraphs, where Gladney observes the college’s students returning to campus in single file:
The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags — onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.
You’re forgiven if you stopped reading halfway through and skipped down. You didn’t miss anything.
Critic B. R. Myers categorizes this manner of list-making as a symptom of “a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.” That’s pretty much what the first half of White Noise adds up to. There’s more of these dreary lists in the book, and plenty of tin-eared dialogue to boot, as evidenced in this exchange between Gladney and his wife:
“It’s not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?”
“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”
“I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said.
“Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”
“Not that we don’t have a station wagon ourselves.”
“It’s small, it’s metallic gray, it has one whole rusted door.”
Or this moment—the most famous in the book—when Gladney’s school-aged daughter talks in her sleep:
She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.
Toyota Celica.
A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform.
I suppose for a certain type of person, this is a scream, gold-shot and looming. I’m not that type of person.
It’s the phoniness of White Noise I can’t let go of. The excuse of “it’s a satire” does not forgive the writer from grasping and depicting the reality of a situation. The power of satire is to capture the genuine and turn its underbelly over to tickle it—to reveal its absurdities in both premise and execution. DeLillo never accomplishes this. Professors don’t inventory their students’ goods from afar; husbands don’t tell their wives that the station wagon has a junky door (when any wife would full-well know this); and if a daughter was repeating a car make and model in her sleep, no one would declare it a religious experience. The absurdity of White Noise is not the mindless consumers populating it, but that this novel somehow is considered a smart skewering of them.
Compare the above to George Carlin’s ridiculing of American materialism in his infamous “Stuff” sketch:
DeLillo’s range-finding jabs are timid compared to Carlin’s honed wit, from the basic observation that homes are just lockboxes for our precious objects, to the game-theoretic anguish of weighing which personal goods make the cut for an overnight excursion. He even indulges in his own Consumerland-like list (“Afrin 12-hour decongestant nasal spray”) that is far briefer, funnier, and better-curated than DeLillo’s weary catalogs. The laughs aren’t merely at Carlin’s on-stage antics, but in the gnawing sensation that we’re guilty of what he’s describing—and Carlin’s tacit admission that he’s guilty of it, too. Meanwhile, in White Noise, we’re supposed to be chortling at the mindlessness of our inferiors. DeLillo is othering America—for whose benefit? Why, Americans like him: Americans who deny their American-ness.
(In this sense, I suspect the Netflix adaptation will execute much like Adam McKay’s smug Don’t Look Up, a spoof also predicated on an America stupefied by cable television and fast food.)
It’s not merely the elitism that fails to connect. Gladney’s field of “Hitler studies” is never really fleshed out. It could have been a fascinating device (although it risked from page one falling into the trap of Godwin’s Law). As the book wears on, the Hitler studies thing feels like a gag DeLillo thought would reap comic gold, and only realized chapters in that the idea had run out of gas. The best he can do is have Gladney deliver a lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis Presley—there’s your Godwin’s Law at work. When Gladney admits he’s only recently learned German, you realize how thin the satire really is: This is not a real professor of Hitler studies.
When I say “Gladney is not a real professor of Hitler studies,” I don’t mean it in the same way that W. H. Auden said Shrike is not a real newspaper editor in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Auden meant that Miss Lonelyhearts is not about newspapermen or journalism—the premise of a man taking a position as an advice columnist is merely a convenience to place the book’s heart-wrenching confessional letters into his hands. Gladney’s field is very much intended to satirize him and academia, but the joke is never explored and left unfulfilled. It becomes a shingle to hang around Gladney’s neck, doing precious little to inform his worldview or way of life.
The main course for White Noise, though, is the American bourgeoisie. The metaphysics of supermarkets are discussed by the book’s characters (always with a straight face). Death is discussed in excruciating abstractions and legalistic terms. The book concludes with Gladney looking out over a hazy dusk, the air thick with toxic chemicals, and admiring its beauty. (No—really.)
What’s the problem with Netflix adapting the book? In truth, I don’t care much one way or the other. What stunned me—and motivated those posts on social media—is that White Noise was always intended to be a sharp poke in the eye for middle America, with plenty of scorn reserved for major corporations and the mass media.
In other words, White Noise satirizes the type of corporation that’s adapting it into a movie, mocks the people that corporation will be marketing the film at, and despises the corporation collecting its profits as the mindless mob watches on from the comfort of the sofas in their McMansions, with their living rooms, their family rooms, their bedrooms, their candy rooms, their office rooms, their great rooms.
The Illuminerdi (via) reports Apple TV+ is tooling up to produce a streaming adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer. The big question Illuminerdi concerns itself with is which actor will play protagonist Case, a drug-abusing hacker hired to pull off a virtual heist in cyberspace.
The story buries the lede. The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.”
Neuromancer is a brilliant novel, one of my favorites, and by my lights, the book that rearranged science fiction. Just as Raymond Chandler did not invent the hard-boiled detective novel, William Gibson did not invent cyberpunk. But both authors took earlier bricklaying done by them and other writers, pulled it all together, and buffed the final result to a chrome-like sheen. There’s science fiction before Neuromancer, and there’s science fiction after Neuromancer.
Hence Neuromancer on film has been a hot topic among science fiction fans since the book was first published in 1984. Every few years over the subsequent decades, news would percolate up that a movie adaptation was in the works, only for the organizers to lose interest, fail to find finding, or simply not get the green light. The Wikipedia section on Neuromancer‘s numerous aborted film adaptations doesn’t do justice to its rocky history. Fake movie trailers have been sewn together; fan-made movie posters have been photoshopped. The rumors, anticipation, and disappointments surrounding the film’s production are legion. (My response to hearing of this latest adaptation attempt: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”)
There were several sidelights along the road to this moment, starting with Johnny Mnemonic in 1996. At first glance, it appeared the perfect aperitif for Neuromancer fans: Mnemonic was an adaptation of a Gibson short story set in the same story universe. The film landed flat, though, and is pretty grating to watch. (Some call it a cult classic—I can’t tell if they’re being ironic or not). Keanu Reeves turned in a cold performance (which he claims was intentional) within a confounding and bizarrely campy narrative. Some say Mnemonic was underfunded. Gibson said it was overfunded. Even if the studio execs were clueless in their meddling—not a stretch to imagine—I still think postmodernist director Robert Longo was simply in over his head.
(That said, I’ve not seen the new re-edit Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White, so I’ll reserve judgment whether the film is irredeemable. I admit: The stills look damn promising.)
Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White
It took The Matrix (1999) to give hungry cyberpunks the cinematic meal they were waiting for. There’s so many parallels between it and Neuromancer, you can’t help but think the writing/directing Wachowskis owe Gibson a pitcher of beer (if not a brewery). But Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) was on to something when, after viewing the film, he claimed “Cyberpunk? Done.” By using up Neuromancer‘s best devices, as well as every philosophical question explored by Philip K. Dick, the Wachowskis came close to shutting the door on the most interesting development in genre fiction since the 1930s. The banality and repetitiousness of the next three Matrix films—including 2021’s Resurrections, which I held a sliver of hope for—only seemed to cement Aronofsky’s point.
(Cyberpunk’s heyday in the 1990s has passed, but neo-cyberpunk lives. The new breed exists where a worldwide computer network is no longer an imagined future, but a concrete element of the story’s past.)
I’m perennially suspicious of Hollywood adapting books to the screen, especially science fiction. Too often screenwriters will ditch the most memorable and gripping parts of the source material to slide in Tinseltown’s tired narrative shorthand. Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle leaps to mind. I’ve not seen the recent adaptation of Foundation, but at least one reviewer thinks Asimov’s classic hasn’t actually been adapted. Still, Illuminerdi reports William Gibson is signed on as an executive producer for Neuromancer. That gives me a touch more confidence in the direction of the project.
But only a touch. In 2015, I wrote how Hollywood has abandoned “‘tight, gapless screenwriting’ to scripts focused on world-building, sequels, expansion, rebooting.” That was written in time when superhero franchises were claiming greater real estate at the cineplexes, and Hollywood had finished converting Tolkien’s charming tale about wee folk into a eight-hour epic-action trilogy. Cinema houses still ruled back then. Like a sneeze coming on, the theater owners knew a violent upheaval was imminent. Today, streaming services are the premier way to deliver movies to eager audiences. And that’s what worries me the most.
MIlla Jovovich as Molly Millions in Neuromancer (fan-made movie poster)
My dread is not that this cyberpunk classic will be adapted to television instead of the silver screen—it’s to see it adapted to a medium that expects seasons and episodes. As with High Castle and Foundation, the streaming services love season-long episodic television: All the better for binge-watching.
Episodic television ushers in the narrative shorthand that Neuromancer absolutely does not need: every hour ending on a contrived cliffhanger; the sexual tension of when-will-they-hook-up; the let-down of the couple separating (complete with the trite break-up language of television: “I need some space” or, “This is going too fast”); and so on.
Even if you’re coming in without having read a page of Asimov, you’ll still notice the drawn-out plots that go nowhere, the padding, and the weird choices the show has the characters make to keep the plot from moving forward. Cheap, nonsensical melodrama fills the series…The show also wants to have pew-pew laser battles and ship fights and spacewalk mishaps and junk, none of which offer anything you haven’t seen before, and are usually used to just run out the clock anyway.
He makes this sharp observation:
Then there’s the show’s terror that people might not make certain connections, so it shows something, has the character comment on it to themself, and then maybe throws in a flashback to someone saying something relevant even if it was said three minutes prior.
This comes from television writing 101: “Tell them what they’re going to see, show it to them, and then tell them what they saw.” If that sounds like how to organize a Powerpoint presentation, you’re right. It’s also why television writing in 2022 remains hard-wired to the narrative structures of I Love Lucy.
Just as Gibson’s console jockeys rewired systems to hijack signal broadcasts and repurposed wet-tech to bore holes through firewalls, let’s hope modern streaming technology is bent to Neuromancer‘s whims, and not vice-versa.
Addendum: One of the criticisms I’ve received, here and elsewhere, is that Neuromancer cannot properly be condensed into a two-hour movie, hence a series is a better fit for its adaptation.
I agree a multi-part show is appropriate for Neuromancer‘s intricate story line. I loathe condensing Neuromancer into a ninety-minute film almost as much as I loathe seeing Neuromancer: Season Two on my TV screen. However, when I originally wrote the above post, I kept fishing around for a good example of a multi-episode streaming series (for illustrative purposes), and failed to locate one.
This morning I recalled The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (which started life on FX and moved to Netflix). Its miniseries format would work well for Neuromancer. Each segment builds the story and develops characters toward a conclusion, like chapters in a novel. There’s a beginning, a middle, and a door-closing end.
My gripe is that Apple TV+ may attempt to “episodize” Neuromancer, making it more like a soap opera or a recurring show than a single story told a chapter at a time. This is what happened to Man in the High Castle—which was more “inspired by” than a retelling of the source material—and what appears happened to Foundation.
Mystery and Suspense Magazine has published my article “Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective” on their web site. In it, I explore the traditional reasons why critics and fans think the Baker Street detective remains popular—even immortal—to this day, and offer in return my own thoughts on the subject:
What is the enduring appeal of this shape-shifting character? Doyle gives no indication that Holmes is particularly attractive or magnetic in personality. He can be cold, abrasive, and downright rude in moments. One cannot help but feel Dr. Watson is a man with a remarkable reservoir of patience. How many Sherlock Holmes adventures open with the detective challenging Watson to discern the history of a person from nothing more than a walking stick, a battered hat, or a muddied shoe? Watson entertains Holmes and his games of deduction, but always as the lesser, never as the equal. (In my experience, medical doctors are not the sorts of people who take well to being talked down to.) Why would such a man continue to fascinate and entertain well into the 21st century?
My thinking on Doyle and his creation has shifted over the past few years due to a renewed appreciation for the Sherlock Holmes canon and, of course, writing a reinterpretation of his classic The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Well, the results are in: My interactive fiction game According to Cain placed 6th in the 2022 Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp). This is my first IF Comp, and my first full-length interactive fiction, so I’m more than pleased to have placed in the top ten. (There were 71 entries total, and over 4,000 votes cast this year.)
Notably, According to Cain took 1st place in the Miss Congeniality contest. This is the award given to the game rated highest by the other game competition authors. I’m honored that the other creators rated Cain this way.
It was quite the haul getting to this point. Writing and debugging the game took a year’s time, and the competition itself lasts 45 days, which is nerve-jangling in its own right.
Congratulations to everyone else in the competition, including the top three winners: The Grown-Up Detective Agency by Brendan Patrick Hennessy, The Absence of Miriam Lane by Abigail Corfman, and A Long Way to the Nearest Star by SV Linwood.
