First Look at George RR Martin’s ‘Nightflyers’ TV Series

Another George RR Martin creation is coming to television courtesy of SyFy.

SyFy has released the first look at Nightflyers, a new series based on the novella by Martin, who is best known for writing the A Song of Ice and Fire novels on which HBO’s Game of Thrones is based.

Nightflyers is a sci-fi/horror story that Martin describes in the above video as being like “Psycho in space.” Take a look above.

Set 75 years in the future, the show will follow a group of scientists on the starship Nightflyer as they make first contact with an alien race with horrific results.

“In a lot of science fiction, it’s always aliens (that) are coming to take our resources or our water or our energy,” showrunner Jeff Buhler tells USA Today. “In this case, it’s really the journey and what takes place on the ship that drives the horror, and the dynamics between all these characters.

“They’ve been disenfranchised, they’ve been oppressed; there’s a lot of prejudice against them as a group,” Buhler continues. “And there’s a lot of interesting dynamics that creates when you bring someone on board a ship that’s confined and you’re on a long journey isolated in deep space.”

Nightflyers stars Gretchen Mol as psychiatrist Dr. Agatha Matheson, Eoin Bracken as the astrophysicist and expedition leader Karl D’Branin, David Ajala as Captain Roy Eris, and Sam Strike as the telepath Thale.

Martin’s original Nightflyers novella was released in 1980 in an issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The story is part of the “Thousand Worlds’ universe, which is also the setting of several other Maritn stories, including Dying of the Light, Sandkings, A Song for Lya, “The Way of Cross and Dragon” and the stories found in the collection Tuf Voyaging. Nightflyers was used as the title story in a collection of Martin’s short stories released in 1985 and was adapted into a movie in 1987.

Nightflyers began production in Limerick, Ireland in early 2018. Martin is listed as an executive producer on the series, but will not work on the show directly due to his exclusive agreement with HBO. Nightflyers is set for a 10-episode run on SyFy beginning this fall.