Hulu adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy for TV

The fantasy and sci-fi TV renaissance continues apace. Deadline reports that Hulu is adapting Canadian sci-fi icon Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy of books, about a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by a pandemic. Timely, I know.

Hulu, of course, is in the midst of adapting Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is about a grim future of another sort. The first book in the MaddAddam series, 2003’s Oryx and Crake, is actually mostly concerned with what led up to the apocalypse. The story takes place in a world dominated by huge corporations, where a brilliant bioengineer — that’d be Crake — conspires to create a miracle drug that will actually bring about human extinction, making way for Crake’s more peaceful group of genetically engineered humans.

There’s no word on when the MaddAddam show might come along, but it’s good to see ambitious stories like this getting adapted. And I guess Hulu is just the official home of Margaret Atwood stories now.

N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy is coming to TV

And that’s not the only influential sci-fi/fantasy story just announced for TV. Deadline also reports that Westbrook Studios is developing a TV show based on N.K. Jemisin’s’ award-winning Inheritance Trilogy. Westbrook Studios was founded by Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, so there are some big names involved from the start.

Compared to MaddAddam, the Inheritance Trilogy — starting with the 2010 book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms — is far more fantasy than sci-fi. It follows Yeine, the chief of the Darre people, who finds herself summoned to the floating city of Sky after the mysterious death of her mother. There, she is told by her grandfather Dekarta that she is the heir to his throne, which basically means she’s in line to rule the world.

Naturally, not everyone is pleased with his, most notably her cousins, who thought they were going to inherit Dekarta’s kingdom. Oh, and did I mention that Dekarta keeps a quartet on gods imprisoned on Sky to use as weapons? So that’s a factor, too.

In short, there’s lots of interesting sci-fi and fantasy shows on the horizon! It’s a good time to be into this stuff.

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