NIGHTFLYERS Coming Your Way

October 26, 2018 at 4:24 pm

NIGHTFLYERS, the new SyFy series based on my 1980 novella of the same name, is heading for your home screens soon.

SyFy has just announced that they will be rolling out the show on DECEMBER 2, on all platforms. Netflix will follow.

A new trailer has also been unveiled.

I saw the first episode on my recent visit to LA, after the Emmy Awards (for anyone who wasn’t watching — we WON). Yes, there are significant differences from my novella. I always knew that would be the case; there was no way the novella, which has a very definite ending, could translate to a multi-season series. On its own terms, though, the show is very well made; the sets and effects look gorgeous, and there’s a terrific, talented cast, and a story that even I cannot predict. And of course, as I have said before, it was a thrill for me to finally see Melantha Jhirl portrayed the way I wrote her.

The show is pretty scary too. Make no mistake, this is as much horror as it is science fiction. By design.

Anyway… check it out on Netflix or SyFy and make up your own minds. (You’ll do that anyway, I know. My readers are like that).

For all the details of the rollout plan, go to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nightflyers-syfy-sets-multi-platform-170016282.html — or your favorite TV news sources on the internet.

(And for those who want to check out my original story, signed copies are available from the bookstore at the Jean Cocteau Cinema).

Current Mood: bouncy bouncy

Tags: science fiction, television

NIGHTFLYERS Trailer Debuts

March 21, 2018 at 12:34 pm

SyFy has rolled out the first trailer for the NIGHTFLYERS tv series, scheduled to debut this fall.

Check it out:

I am amused to see my own appearances in the promo. SyFy sent a film crew to Santa Fe last month, and we spent most of an afternoon taping a long interview about “Nightflyers,” its inspiration and publication history, my Thousand Worlds, horror v SF v hyrbids, and so on. I hope at some point they will use some of that material, beyond the two sentences that made it into the trailer.

Very cool to see the show coming together.

Current Mood: curious curious

Tags: horror, science fiction, television

Another Night, More Flyers

February 1, 2018 at 2:51 pm

With the NIGHTFLYERS television series deep in the throes of pre-production and set to start filing over in Limerick soon, my original novella will soon be available again… twice.

Tor is going to reissuing NIGHTFLYERS & OTHER STORIES, the short story collection we released originally in 1985. More details on that one in my post of January 18, below.

Bantam Spectra is also going to be publishing NIGHTFLYERS, as a stand-alone deluxe illustrated hardcover. The text will be the original novella, in its expanded 30,000 word version. The Bantam edition will also include fifteen interior illustrations and two endpapers from the astonishing and talented David Palumbo, printed in four color. Release is scheduled for May 29.

The cover is by Larry Rostant:

A few months later, in late August, Bantam will release a trade paperback tie-in edition, featuring key art from the TV series on the covers, with Palumbo’s interior illustrations in black & white.

If you haven’t read “Nightflyers” yet, you will have plenty of opportunity. Hope you enjoy it.

((Comments permitted, but stay on topic)).

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Tags: bantam spectra, nightflyers, science fiction

SyFy Greenlights NIGHTFLYERS Pilot

June 24, 2017 at 7:05 pm

Here’s some cool news for the fans of my Thousand Worlds stories… y’know, the science fiction that I wrote way back when, long before I thought of GAME OF THRONES.

The SyFy Channel has just greenlit the pilot for a proposed NIGHTFLYERS series, based on my 1980 Hugo-losing novella, one of my SF/ horror hybrids.

Details can be found here (and in lots of other places on the web):

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/george-rr-martins-nightflyers-picked-up-pilot-at-syfy-1016296

Since I’m exclusive to HBO, I can’t be part of the NIGHTFLYERS development, but I wish them well. The novella was a favorite of mine (especially the longer version that I did for BINARY STARS), and I think the show could have a lot of potential… especially if you like a little horror in your SF.

If it looks as good as THE EXPANSE, by my pal Jimmy Corey…

(That pic up above is me and Parris at Denvention II, by the way, the night that “Nightflyers” lost the Hugo to Gordy Dickson).

Tags: science fiction, television and film

Here’s the Scoop on NIGHTFLYERS

May 16, 2017 at 5:31 pm

Last week in the trades a couple of stories appeared about NIGHTFLYERS:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/george-rr-martin-novella-nightflyers-headed-tv-syfy-1001934

http://www.tor.com/2017/05/11/syfy-adapting-george-r-r-martins-novella-nightflyers-for-television/

There were a bunch more. Google and you’ll find ’em. Needless to say, once those stories appeared I was deluged with requests for comment and clarification.

Here’s the scoop.

In 1980 I wrote a novella called “Nightflyers.” It was one of my SF/ horror hybrids, a ‘haunted starship’ story, set in my Thousand Worlds universe. ANALOG published the first version, which weighed in at 23,000 words and got a beautiful cover. “Nightflyers” was nominated for a Hugo Award as Best Novella, but lost out to Gordon R. Dickson’s “Lost Dorsai” at Denvention. (That’s me and Parris at Denvention in the icon picture).

Later on, at the urging of editor Jim Frenkel, I expanded the novella to 30,000 words, and it was teamed with Vernor Vinge’s “True Names” as part of Dell’s ‘Binary Star’ series, an attempt to revive the old ‘Ace Double’ concept. I liked the original 23,000 words version, but I liked the expanded version even better. The expansions gave me room to flesh out the characters more. (In the original version, most of the secondary characters did not even have names).

In 1984 I sold the film and television rights to “Nightflyers” to a writer/ producer named Robert Jaffe and his father Herb.

In 1985 “Nightflyers” was published again as the featured story in a collection of my short work called NIGHTFLYERS, a trade paperback from Bluejay Books.

IN 1986 the Jaffes picked up their option and principal photography began on the film version of NIGHTFLYERS, directed by Robert Collector and starring Catherine Mary Stewart and Michael Praed. It was released in 1987. Jaffe’s screenplay, I think, was based on the 23,000 word version of the story rather than the expanded 30,000 word version, since all the secondary characters had new names, rather than the ones I’d given them for the Binary Star edition.

Which brings us to the present, and those news stories.

This new NIGHTFLYERS television series — actually, it is just a pilot script at present, still several steps short of going on-air, but I am told that SyFy likes the script a lot — was developed based on the 1987 movie, and the television rights conveyed in that old 1984 contract. Robert Jaffe is one of the producers, I see, but the pilot script is by Jeff Buhler. I haven’t had the chance to meet him yet, but hope to do so in the near future.

Since I have an overall deal that makes me exclusive to HBO, I can’t provide any writing or producing series to NIGHTFLYERS should it go to series… but of course, I wish Jaffe and Buhler and their team the best of luck. “Nightflyers” was one of my best SF stories, I always felt, and I’d love to see it succeed as a TV series (fingers crossed that it looks as good as THE EXPANSE).

And that’s all I know just now.

Tags: science fiction, syfy, television

Scalzi in Santa Fe

April 18, 2017 at 2:11 am

Bestseller, Hugo Award winner, former SFWA president, blogger, bon vivant, and the world’s leading expert on taping bacon to cats… John Scalzi is a man of many parts.

He made a whirlwind visit to Santa Fe yesterday, and the Jean Cocteau was thrilled to host him.

He did not actually sing in the rain. But he did play a ukulele. And he talked. And laughed. Ate a churro and some carne adovada. And signed a LOT of books.

(That’s me and Steve Gould with him in the picture)

If you couldn’t be there, hey, no problem. We’ll be putting up a video of our talk. And we made him sign stock before we let him go, so you can get your autographed copies of THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE, OLD MAN’S WAR, and REDSHIRTS (winner of The Big One) from the Jean Cocteau website.

http://jeancocteaucinema.com/

Next up: magician Francis Menotti.

Tags: author events, jean cocteau cinema bookstore, science fiction, signed books, signings

A Sense of Wonder

April 10, 2017 at 12:00 pm

I’ve made my life in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, and an awful lot of people helped me along the way. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. But if I may echo something that Robert A. Heinlein once said, you can never pay back the people who helped you when you were starting out… but you can pay forward, and give a hand to those coming after.

With that in mind, I’m pleased to announce that I will be funding a new scholarship for the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop. Held every summer at the University of California San Diego under the auspices of the Clarion Foundation, the workshop’s roots go back the 1960s and Clarion College in Pennsylvania, where it was founded by Robin Scott Wilson, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm. Its alumni include more professional sf and fantasy writers than I can possibly hope to name, and the list of Clarion instructors over the years is a veritable Who’s Who of our genre.

Many of the students at Clarion already receive financial aid through a variety of existing scholarships and grants that cover all or part of their expenses, but there’s always need and there’s never enough money, and it’s my hope that this new scholarship will offer an opportunity to one more worthy applicant who might not otherwise have been able to afford the experience. It will be a full scholarship, given annually, and covering tuition, fees, and lodging for a single student for the full six weeks of intensive writing and criticism that is Clarion.

We’ll be calling it the Sense of Wonder scholarship.

The award will not be limited by age, race, sex, religion, skin color, place of origin, or field of study. The only criteria will be literary.

The first science fiction novel I ever read was Heinlein’s HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, a book that begins with a boy named Kip in a used spacesuit standing in his back yard, and goes on to take him (and us) to the moon, and Pluto, and the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, along the way encountering aliens both horrifying (the Wormfaces) and benevolent (the Mother Thing), as well as a girl named Peewee. In the end it’s up to Kip and Peewee to defend the entire human race when Earth is put on trial. I had never read anything like it, and from the moment I finished I wanted more; more Heinlein, more science fiction, more aliens and spacesuits and starships… more of the vast interstellar vistas that had opened before me.

Since then I have read thousands of other science fiction novels, and written a few myself. Modern imaginative fiction is a house with many rooms, and I’ve visited most of them. Cyberpunk, New Wave, magic realism, slipstream, military SF, dystopias, utopias, urban fantasy, high fantasy, splatterpunk, the new weird, the new space opera, you name it. I’ve sampled all of it, and I’m glad it’s all there, but when it comes right down it, the SF I love best is still the SF that gives me that sense of wonder I found in that Heinlein book almost sixty years ago, and afterwards in the works of Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Alfred Bester, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Vance, Andre Norton, the early Chip Delany, Jack Vance, Frank Herbert, Robert Silverberg, Jack Vance, Eric Frank Russell, Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, and so many more. (Did I mention Jack Vance?) I love the aliens, be they threatening or benevolent, the more alien the better. I dream of starships, strange worlds beneath the light of distant suns. I want the sights and sounds and smells of times and places and cultures colorful and exotic. That was the sort of science fiction that I tried to write myself with the Thousand Worlds stories that made my name in the 70s, when I was just breaking in as a writer.

It’s my hope that this new Clarion scholarship will help find and encourage young aspiring writers who dream the same sort of dreams, that it will give a small boost up to the next Roger Zelazny, the next Ursula Le Guin, the next Jack Vance.

One student will be selected every year. The recipient of the first award is LUCY SMITH, an English writer and recent student of archaeology who has been making stories for most of her life. She has just begun tweeting at @subterranape, and can usually be found in London. I have yet to meet her, but I hope that she enjoys her six weeks at Clarion, and that the lessons she learns there will help her develop her talent and master her craft. And in the years and books to come, I hope that Lucy Smith will take us to the stars, and show us wonders.

Tags: science fiction, teaching, writing

A Damned Good Read

December 24, 2016 at 5:27 pm

Let me get the taste of this week’s football out of my mouth and turn to a more pleasant subject — the latest volume in the Expanse series, BABYLON’S ASHES, which I just finished reading a few days ago.

You know, for a voracious reader like myself, life has few pleasures that compare to finding a really good book, the sort that grabs you from page one and won’t let go, so you find yourself late at night, wanting to sleep but thinking, “Just one more chapter, just one more chapter,” until dawn breaks and you’ve read the whole damned thing.

That’s BABYLON’S ASHES. The Expanse series has been terrific from the beginning, but it went to a new level with the last volume, NEMESIS GAMES, which should have been a Hugo finalist last year. This new one is just as good. It will definitely be one of the books on my own nominating ballot. Jimmy Corey (who is really Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham in a two-man pantomime horse costume) just keeps getting better.

It also occurs to me that BABYLON’S ASHES would make a very worthy nominee for the new awards that Atlanta’s Dragoncon has started, the Dragon Awards. The Dragons, given for the first time last year, aspire to be the People’s Choice Awards of SF and fantasy… and could well achieve that if they can get sufficient participation from all sectors of fandom. Unlike the Hugo Awards, the Dragons have no short fiction categories, but they do give a number of awards for novel: best sf, best fantasy, best horror, best military SF, etc. “Military SF” has become popular enough to be regarded as its own category these days, it would seem. (Which was not formerly the case. Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS and Haldeman’s FOREVER WAR both won Hugo Awards simply as Best Novel back in the day, and — together perhaps with Gordy Dickson’s Dorsai series — pretty much defined what is known as ‘Milsf’ today).

One of the joys of the Expanse series is the way Jimmy Corey dances between subgenres. The series is certainly science fiction, no doubt of that, but assigning it to any particular sub-genre is more more difficult. Some parts read like space opera, some parts strike me as hard SF. The first book, LEVIATHAN WAKES, had some pretty strong horror elements with its vomit zombies, and also a real noir-ish mystery feel in the Miller chapters. With BABYLON’S ASHES, however, the war comes center stage, and we are definitely in the realm of Military SF. Lots of action, lots of tension, lots of battle… with some great world-building and characters you really care about. So I’m thinking, if we are going to have special awards for Mil-SF, I cannot think of a more worthy contender than the new Corey. So… Hugo, Dragon, or whatever, I commend BABYLON’S ASHES to your consideration. I think you’ll like it. I sure did.

Oh, and speaking of THE EXPANSE… there’s a second season of the TV show coming at us as well. Here’s a trailer for it.

<lj-embed id=”867″/>

Tags: awards, hugo award, science fiction, television

Something Old, Something New

May 15, 2016 at 12:39 am

There’s some crazy people out on the edge of the galaxy. Their names are Mike Resnick and Shahid Mahmud. At a time when all of the storied old magazines of our genre are struggling to survive, in the face of rising costs and declining circulations, they went and started a new one, and called it GALAXY’S EDGE.

I love the magazines… it’s where I started, after all… so I’m thrilled to see a new addition to the field. Especially one like GALAXY’S EDGE, where editor Mike Resnick is making a point of featuring new writers. But every magazine needs a few established names on the cover, which is where I come in… the established name on their latest (May) issue is mine. The issue features a reprint of one of my old SF stories, “Fast-Friend,” plus a new interview with me.

GALAXY’S EDGE will have a table at Balticon at the end of the month, and I’ll be signing 200 copies of the issue for sale at the con.

For those who cannot make it to Baltimore, home of the ravens and the crabs, you can get a copy direct from the website at www.galaxysedge.com/ — but maybe not a signed one, alas.

Tags: conventions, science fiction

Countdown to Liftoff

March 21, 2016 at 7:45 pm

Only ten more days remain until the close of nominations for the 2016 Hugo Awards, to be presented in Kansas City at MidAmericon II.

Are you a member of MidAmericon? Were you a member of Sasquan, last year’s worldcon in Spokane? Are you a member of the 2017 worldcon, to be held in Helsinki, Finland? If so, you’re eligible to nominate the books and stories and artists you loved best in 2015.

So, please… NOMINATE!

You can do it here: http://midamericon2.org/the-hugo-awards/hugo-nominations/

No fan of good will, no one who truly loves SF and fantasy and worldcon and fandom, wants a repeat of what happened to the Hugo Awards last year. I am not going to rehash that sorry mess; there’s no point to it, everything that needed to be said has been said, and a lot more besides. I would rather look to the future. Let’s restore the silver rocket to its former glory (and, by doing so, make a second round of Alfie Awards unnecessary) as a true measure of the year’s best work in imaginative literature.

I made my objections to the Puppy slates clear last year. This time around, the Sad Puppies at least changed from a slate to a recommendation list, to which I have no objections. I’ve looked at their list. There’s some great work on it. There’s some bad work on it, writers and books that I don’t think belong anywhere near a Hugo. And there’s a lot of books and stories that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. The same could be said for most any list, however. There’s stuff on the Nebula shortlist I don’t like as well, and a lot of books on the LOCUS list that I have not read yet. (I will get to some of them. Too many books, too little time). Sad Puppies 4 played fair, in my estimation, and for that I commend them.

((The Rabid Puppies produced another slate. They have entirely different aims. And no, we will not discuss them here)).

And how about my own recommendations?

I’ve made a few. I did not issue them all at once, in a single list, but rather category by category over the past five months. I did not get to every category, and even with those I did, my recommendations are by no means exhaustive.

My intent, whenever I make a recommendation, is NOT to say, “Vote for this,” but rather, “Here’s something I really liked, take a look it it, you may find it deserving as well.”

Some of the other recommended reading lists are just lists of titles and names. Fine and good, I suppose, but I prefer to do a little more: to talk about the categories, the books, the authors, the artists and editors, and where I can to discuss WHY I think they deserve a nomination.

My posts are still up. For those who want to read them, here are links:

Short Fiction:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/476905.html

Professional Editor, Long Form:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/474144.html
http://grrm.livejournal.com/472316.html
http://grrm.livejournal.com/471834.html
http://grrm.livejournal.com/470764.html

Professional Editor, Short Form:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/471135.html

Professional Artist:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/462350.html

Graphic Story:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/460106.html

Related Work:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/458605.html

Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/453648.html

Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/452587.html

Novel:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/457140.html

If any of you go back and read those — and I hope you will — read the comments too. There are plenty of other recommendations to be found there, recommendations from my readers and friends. I am only one (overworked) guy, I can’t get to everything, it’s great to hear from other precincts. Especially when they tell you why they liked whatever it is they liked…

I did mean to get to some of the other categories. Alas, I failed. I am just not knowledgeable enough to make recommendations in some areas.

I did overlook some good choices even in the categories I covered. Naomi Novik’s UPROOTED is her best work to date, a very strong fantasy (though I had problems with the ending) and probably worth a nomination in Novel. I forgot about EX MACHINA when talking about Long Form Drama, but it’s a gripping and well done film, worthy of consideration. I recommended OUTLANDER for Short Form Drama, but it should be noted that the first season was telecast in two eight-episode arcs, and only the second eight are eligible, as the first eight were broadcast in 2014. I think JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL should be nominated in Long Form as a whole, rather than in Short Form, by episode, but others disagree.

Anyway… quibbles and additions aside… read, watch, consider… and please…

NOMINATE!

Tags: awards, fantasy, hugo awards, science fiction, worldcon

Not a Blog