George R.R. Martin talks Starport, an adaptation of his rejected TV show

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin was in New York City just recently, checking in with publishers, agents, and friends new and old. As he detailed on his Not a Blog, he also stopped by Midtown Comics to do an interview with Raya Golden, who recently converted his unproduced pilot script for a science fiction show called Starport into a graphic novel. Watch below!

Martin has talked before about his time in the TV business before, and how he would develop pilot scripts only for them to go nowhere. Now that he’s one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, it looks like people are banging on his door to put even his rejected scripts on shelves in some form. And if illustrators like Raya Golden get gigs out of it, all the better.

Admittedly, the synopsis for Starport does sound interesting:

"Law & Order meets Men in Black in this graphic novel adaptation of an unproduced TV pilot script by the author of A Game of Thrones—a never-before-seen story brought to life for the first time. Ten years ago, representatives from an interstellar collective of 314 alien species landed on Earth, inviting us to become number 315. Now, after seemingly endless delays, the Starport in Chicago is operational, a destination for diplomats, merchants, and tourists alike. Inside, visitors are governed by intergalactic treaty. Outside, the streets belong to Chicago’s finest."

And if that doesn’t sell you on the story, there’s a seven-foot tall minotaur named Stacko, a particular favorite of Golden’s. Sign me up!

Starport Graphic Novel by George R.R. Martin and Raya Golden

There are lots of aliens in Starport. Naturally, Martin’s descriptions of them are detailed even in this unproduced television script, as Martin and Golden detail.

It’s also interesting to look back, through Martin’s eyes, at this era of genre television production. When Martin developed Starport for Fox in the ’90s, the network had just cancelled a sci-fi police procedural called Alien Nation and was looking for something more immediate than Star Trek or Star Wars. “We don’t want to have to go thousands of years in the future, and we don’t want alien planets,” a FOX exec told Martin. “We want something set on contemporary Earth.”

Of course, Fox passed on the show, in part because it thought there were too many aliens. Justice for Stacko.

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Martin also talked about another collaboration with Golden on a graphic novel called Meathouse Man, which was, as he put it, “based on one of [his] twisted and sickest stories.” The synopsis, if you please:

"Meathouse Man is a darkly poignant tale set on a collection of planets called corpse worlds. On these planets, corpse handlers transmit their wills to an army of brainless bodies—once living people now rendered expendable. Perversion abounds as these corpses are exposed to appalling conditions at the whim of handlers."

So it’s an origin story for the Night King?

Meathouse Man graphic novel by George R.R. Martin and Raya Golden

You can purchase a copy of the Starport graphic novel signed by Raya Golden and George R.R. Martin on Martin’s Jean Cocteau Cinema site for $28.

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