The book is a lot of fun, but it's also not a sacred text. It's a story about a pizza delivery driver who will be murdered if he delivers pizza too late and is also a hacker getting bound up in a story of Sumerian brain programmers run amok. (And somehow these brain programmers also can infect someone's blood?)

For all of its foresight, the book is goofy and dated as hell. If it's going to come to screen there's no way the adaption doesn't either:

1) Update some of the goofier stuff (upsetting the fans)

or

2) Leave it all in, in all its 80s action movie glory. (Which won't look all that great in the modern zeitgeist.)

I'm already expecting people will be disappointed with whoever they cast for Hiro, for either being not Black enough (or too Black) or not Korean enough (or too Korean). Similarly, do they outfit Y.T. with a retrofuturist 80s interpretation of what it means to be a skater punk? Or do they update it to be a 2020s interpretation of what it means to be a future skater punk? There's no answers to these that satisfies everyone. Someone will inevitably say it was 'ruined' no matter what the show runner does.