George R.R. Martin previews Nightflyers, SyFy’s new sci-fi/horror show
By Corey Smith
Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin will be everywhere this holiday season. Fire and Blood is now on bookshelves, and starting December 2, SyFy will air the first season of NightFlyers, a series based on Martin’s 1980 novella of the same name. Ahead of the drop, Martin talked to Syfy Wire about the differences between the series and its source material:
"I knew it had to be different from my novella. Because the novella definitely has a beginning, a middle, and the end. And in the end, most people are dead. They couldn’t do three or four seasons of a spaceship full of corpses."
We’d call that a spoiler alert, but this is George R.R. Martin we’re talking about, so we’ll let it go.
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Nightflyers follows the crew of a spaceship — called the Nightflyer, naturally — on an interstellar expedition to find a way to save a dying planet Earth. It’s a blend of horror and sci-fi, something Martin remembers was once thought of as incompatible:
"I had read an article by a critic around that time that had said, ‘Well, science fiction and horror can never be successfully mixed’ because they’re opposite… horror is all about emotions and fear and a universe that we cannot pretend to understand, and science fiction is always about rationality and intellect and problems [that] are solvable by application of the human mind. And so you can never have a story that was both. And, of course, I took that as a challenge."
It’s kind of hard to believe someone would think horror and sci-fi couldn’t mix, even back then. Maybe Alien hadn’t come out yet?
Anyway, one of the main characters in Nightflyers is Melantha “Mel” Jhirl, a genetically enhanced superhuman raised to travel through space helping her non-superhuman counterparts. You might catch a glimpse of her in the trailer for the 1987 movie version of the story, which I think you’ll agree has aged really well:
In that movie, Mel was played by a white actress, even though Martin wrote her as a black woman. She was also whitewashed on the cover of the original novella, something that always bothered the author:
"I did protest back in the ’80s, but I’ve always felt… troubled, guilty, maybe a little shame that maybe I could have fought harder; maybe I could have made a bigger fuss, maybe I could have made a difference. So third time’s the charm."
Melantha is now played by Jodie Turner-Smith, and Martin is finally on board. “I think Jodie is terrific… She is the character the way I envisioned her, the way I wrote her. And it’s great to see that particular character coming alive.”
Finally, Martin discussed an exciting new storytelling medium: virtual reality. For Nightflyers, SyFy has produced a trio of VR shorts, which you can watch here or on SyFy’s YouTube channel. (You’ll probably need VR equipment to get the full experience, but it’s still fun to move around the camera.)
Martin tried one of the shorts himself, and it sounds like it had a big effect on him. “Not only [can you] read a book or watch a television show, but you can live an adventure,” he said. “You can go into the world and your senses will engage, you’ll see things, you’ll do things — the choices you make will affect the story in one way or another.”
"And that’s [an] exciting possibility. But I think we may be like the theatre before Shakespeare, you know? There were plays before Shakespeare, but it was the Elizabethan theatre that really made the theatre come alive. And of course, movies began with little, real things of trains arriving at the station and then eventually we got up to Star Wars. So there’s a lot of maturation that has to go, but I think it is potentially a really exciting new art form for the future."
It’s not virtual reality, but you can enjoy the first scene from Nightflyers below. We begin in the thick of things:
Again, Nightflyers debuts on Syfy December 2
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