USA TODAY International Edition
‘Thrones’ author has ‘more people to kill’
“Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin is still writing “The Winds of Winter,” the sixth installment of his fantasy book series, but he would like you to pay attention to some other things he’s doing right now, thank you very much.
For starters, he’s working (in various capacities) on five potential prequels to HBO’s soon-to-end series “Game of Thrones,” one of which just cast Naomi Watts. He also just published “Fire and Blood,” set in the Westeros of “Thrones,” which he explains is not the new novel but “an imaginary history.”
Oh, and he’s got “Nightflyers,” a whole new show based on his work coming to Syfy Sunday Dec. 2 (10 EST/ PST).
But yes, he says, he’s still working on “Winter.”
“(I’m) pushing to get that one done, and there’s another one beyond that,” the author says. “I’ve given up predicting when they’ll be finished, because every time I do, then it’s not finished by then and everyone gets mad at me. So I’ve learned to say nothing about it.”
Martin was more keen to talk about “Nightflyers,” an adaptation of his 1980 sci-fi/horror novella about a trip into deep space gone horribly awry that also was adapted into a 1987 film.
“I never did think it would be good for television, actually. It was kind of a surprise to me,” Martin says, noting that he forgot he sold the TV rights along with the film rights back in the ‘80s. “Like, two years ago I heard they were developing it as a television series. It actually surprised me, because no one had purchased any rights or anything like that, but I dug out my contract and said, ‘Oh yeah!’ ... At that point I got in touch with the people at Universal and Syfy and said: ‘I hear you’re developing this for a TV series. I’d like to hear what you’re doing!’”
Despite being the last to know about TV’s “Nightflyers,” Martin is pleased with the final product. The new adaptation greatly expands upon the original story, turning a 30,000word novella into an episodic series. Set in 2098, “Nightflyers” follows the crew of a huge, advanced spaceship flying through the solar system in an attempt to contact alien life. It stars Gretchen Mol as a psychologist tasked with maintaining control of a dangerous psychic brought on board to communicate with the aliens and also features Jodie Turner-Smith (“The Last Ship”) and Eoin Macken (“The Night Shift”).
“If you’ve read the novella or seen the movie, it doesn’t obviously lend itself to a TV series,” Martin says. “It’s a haunted-house story. Everybody dies, except one character. Eight people get on a spaceship and one by one they’re killed horribly, leaving only the heroine at the end. How are you going to sustain a multiepisode – hopefully multi-season – television series from that? You’re going to have to change a lot. But they did, and I think they did it very successfully.”
For one thing, the cast is larger: “It’s not just eight people, where seven of them are going to die.” And, in true Martin style, more characters lead to an even larger bloodbath: “We’ll have a lot more people to kill in future episodes.”