Ever since HBO adapted George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books as Game of Thrones, studios have been in a rush to bring iconic fantasy and sci-fi book series to the small screen. There have been hits and misses. Shows like The Expanse and Outlander earned legions of fans, but people soured on The Witcher the longer it went on, and Amazon foolishly canceled The Wheel of Time just as it was picking up steam.
The adaptation train is losing a bit of steam these days, but when it picks back up, we want studios to be ready, because there are still a lot of great sci-fi and fantasy series they haven’t touched yet.
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
How has no one ever adapted a Brandon Sanderson book?
Brandon Sanderson is a prolific fantasy and sci-fi author who has somehow never had one of his many, many works adapted for the screen. The Stormlight Archive is his biggest, grandest series, but Mistborn is a more accessible one, so it would be a great place to start.
The first trilogy in the Mistborn saga is set in the Final Empire, a fantasy realm ruled over by a seemingly immortal king known as the Lord Ruler. We join an upstart band of do-gooders who intend to end his thousand-year reign.
Sanderson wrote a second Mistborn cycle set many years later, after the world went steampunk. And his upcoming new Mistborn book, Ghostbloods, is set in a 1980s-like environment. Eventually, he could take Mistborn into the stars, so the TV show could run the gamut from fantasy to sci-fi.
- Buy the Mistborn trilogy at Amazon
Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
You don’t know what epic is
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.Credit: LordofMoonSpawn
While the first Mistborn trilogy is pretty easy to get into, Malazan Book of the Fallen is as dense and complicated as these stories get. It stars hundreds of characters and takes place over thousands of years, chronicling the history of the power-hungry Malazan Empire and those who would resist it. Starting with Gardens of the Moon and ending with The Crippled God, there are 10 books in the mainline series, not counting the plentiful spinoff novels.
Malazan almost feels too big to fit in the confines of a TV show. But recently, a lot of “unfilmable” books have come to the screen. The Dune series is famously impenetrable, but the movies are big hits. Apple TV+ is tackling Isaac Asimov’s twisty Foundation series, and Liu Cixin’s brainy Remembrance of Earth’s Past series has become the smartest sci-fi show on Netflix. Who’s to say Malazan couldn’t follow suit?
- Buy Malazan Book of the Fallen at Amazon
The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss
We came this close to getting an adaptation already
At one point, The Kingkiller Chronicle looked like it was going to be the next big thing in fantasy. The first two books — The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear — were very popular, and Lin-Manuel Miranda had signed up to adapt them to TV.
That deal fell apart, but the books are still ripe for adaptation. Some young actor will have the time of his life playing Kvothe, a musician and student of magic who will, we assume, eventually kill a king, if Patrick Rothfuss ever gets around to completing the trilogy with The Doors of Stone.
- Buy The Kingkiller Chronicle books at Amazon
The Fear Saga by Stephen Moss
Fear the lack of a Fear TV show
Credit: Amazon
The Fear Saga is a good old-fashioned tale of alien invasion, told on a grand scale. An extraterrestrial civilization is on its way to Earth. We know they’re coming. We know their technology vastly outstrips our own, but we prepare to resist them anyway, even as alien agents sent ahead to infiltrate our most important organizations make that hard. Some of those agents are grave threats, but others join the resistance. It all leads up to an epic battle for our home planet.
The Fear Saga starts with Fear the Sky and ends with Fear the Future. It’s a tightly plotted sci-fi tale that would make an excellent three-season show. Apple TV+ is becoming the new home of prestige TV and clearly loves sci-fi, so it could be a great fit there.
- Buy The Fear Saga trilogy at Amazon
The First Law by Joe Abercrombie
The king of grimdark
Credit: Amazon
Joe Abercrombie’s First Law books are set in a dog-eat-dog fantasy world on the edge of an industrial revolution, and follow various hard-scrabble warriors who get caught up in the conflict between warring states. The books are bloody, brutal, and peppered with black humor; of the series on this list, First Law is the closest in tone to the Song of Ice and Fire books. If anyone wants to try replicating the success of Game of Thrones, take note.
Abercrombie has written two separate trilogies set in The First Law universe as well as three standalone books. One of those standalone works, Best Served Cold, is being turned into a movie, but I want to see the longer trilogies given the prestige treatment on TV.
- But The First Law books at Amazon
