Streaming turned science fiction into one of the most reliable television genres, especially when there’s established IP to mine into sprawling narratives. Amazon’s Fallout drew 65 million viewers in its first two weeks and became one of Prime Video’s most-watched originals ever, with the series already developing a third season. Foundation gave Apple TV+ a flagship franchise, with the company also producing new sci-fi IP like Severance and Pluribus. Furthermore, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem arrived with a nine-figure budget and the Russo brothers producing, while Silo, built on Hugh Howey’s Wool trilogy, quietly became one of Apple TV+’s most-watched series ever.
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The pipeline keeps expanding, as Blade Runner 2099, a direct sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 film produced under Ridley Scott’s supervision, is in post-production at Prime Video ahead of a 2026 premiere, and a new Stargate series with original creative team members Martin Gero and Brad Wright entered its writers’ room in January 2026. As streaming platforms keep searching for the next sci-fi hit, several high-profile books are being turned into TV shows.
5) Seveneves
Legendary Television acquired the rights to Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves in August 2024 with producer Allison Friedman attached. The studio’s experience sustaining genre television through Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and Lost in Space suggests it understands what the material demands. Stephenson’s 2015 novel opens with the moon splitting into seven pieces and tracks humanity’s two-year race to establish orbital survival infrastructure before the resulting debris renders Earth uninhabitable for five thousand years. While that premise alone demands a massive budget and a careful approach to television writing, Seveneves is also famous for its radical structural break at its midpoint, where the narrative leaps forward five millennia to a remade planet populated by seven genetically divergent human races. No writer, director, network, or cast has been announced for the TV adaptation, which means it might take a couple more years before Seveneves enters production.
4) The Future Is Ours
Netflix’s The Future Is Ours (El Futuro Es Nuestro) draws from Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novel The World Jones Made, making it the first Spanish-language adaptation of the sci-fi master’s work. The eight-episode limited series is set in 2047, in a South America governed by FedSur, an authoritarian environmental coalition whose grip on the continent adds a twist to the novel’s core tension between state control and individual perception. Against this backdrop, the series follows Jonás Flores (Emiliano Zurita), a preacher who can perceive exactly one year into the future, whose arrest by police officer Hugo Crussí (Enzo Vogrincic) accelerates his transformation into a revolutionary figurehead rather than suppressing it. Dick’s daughter, Isa Dick Hackett, is executive producing through Electric Shepherd Productions, the company behind The Man in the High Castle, which established a template for translating Dick’s political ideas into prestige television. While Netflix has yet to set a specific release date, The Future Is Ours is expected to premiere in 2026.
3) The Captive’s War
Amazon MGM Studios announced The Captive’s War in November 2024, and the project’s most compelling asset is its creative continuity with The Expanse—arguably the most rigorously constructed science fiction series in recent television history. James S.A. Corey, the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, is adapting their own new trilogy for the screen, a collaboration that extends to the novels themselves, which are being written in direct coordination with the television narrative. The opening book, The Mercy of Gods, became a New York Times bestseller in August 2024 and follows a human colony called Anjiin after its conquest by the Carryx, an insectoid empire that collects intelligent species as involuntary research subjects. Abraham and Franck have described the premise of The Captive’s War as structurally inspired by the Book of Daniel, and we are curious to see how the story translates into the small screen. Unfortunately, no cast or premiere window has been announced.
2) Neuromancer
William Gibson’s Neuromancer coined the term “cyberspace” in 1984 and provided the conceptual foundation for The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell, which makes the four-decade wait for a serious adaptation one of science fiction’s most glaring omissions. Apple TV+ is the studio that finally closed that gap, confirming a 10-episode series in February 2024 and beginning principal photography on July 1, 2025, the 41st anniversary of the novel’s publication. The series follows Case, a burned-out hacker recruited for a corporate heist into the neural cyberspace of the future, and sits squarely within Apple TV+’s impressive catalog of sci-fi productions. Callum Turner leads the series as Case, with Briana Middleton as Molly, the cybernetically enhanced mercenary whose surgically implanted mirror-lenses are among the most recognizable images in the genre. The series is expected to premiere in late 2026.
1) Consider Phlebas
Amazon MGM Studios announced Consider Phlebas in February 2025, and the attached talent made it immediately the most significant science fiction television project in active development. For starters, Chloé Zhao, whose Nomadland won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, brings her experience to tackle the philosophical premise of Iain M. Banks’ 1987 novel. Consider Phlebas, the first entry in Banks’ ten-book Culture series, follows Horza, a shape-shifting mercenary fighting for the Idiran Empire against the Culture, a post-scarcity civilization governed by hyperintelligent AI entities called Minds. Horza’s conviction that organic life should not submit to machine governance pits him against a civilization whose values he rejects but whose victory is all but inevitable. Writing duties fall to Charles Yu, whose novel Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award before its television adaptation earned him an Emmy. Amazon attempted this adaptation once before in 2018, and that version collapsed before a script was completed, but the new talent involved in the adaptation makes us more hopeful about its future.
What book-to-screen sci-fi adaptation are you most excited to watch? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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