Syfy Adapting George R.R. Martin’s Novella Nightflyers for Television

Among a number of other adaptations that Syfy announced today, the network is adapting George R.R. Martin’s novella Nightflyers. Published in 1980, the science fiction tale follows a crew of explorers on a sentient spaceship, who find their rendezvous with an alien ship possibly derailed by the Nightflyer’s own mission.

Syfy would likely develop the novella into a television series, as the premise leaves a lot of room for building out the main characters and an action-packed space journey within which to do so:

Nightflyers is a science fiction tale set in the future on the eve of Armageddon. A crew of explorers escape Earth’s destruction by boarding the Nightflyer, a highly advanced space ship that is run by an artificial intelligence and has a captain that the explorers never get to see. The mission has them rendezvousing with a mysterious alien spacecraft, but as the journey continues question arise about just where the Nightflyer is really going.

Then again, they could go the cheesy-TV-movie route, not unlike the 1987 film adaptation:

The novella won the 1983 Seiun Award for Best Foreign Language Short Story of the Year, and was later collected into a collection (of the same title) of Martin’s short fiction. Robert Jaffe, who wrote the screenplay for the movie, will serve as a producer on the Syfy project; the adaptation will be written by Lloyd Ivan Miller and Alice P. Neuhauser, of Lloyd Ivan Miller Productions, and Jeff Buhler (Jacob’s Ladder).