Author: Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy / Source: WIRED
The new Syfy series Nightflyers is based on a novella by George R. R. Martin that was first published back in 1980. Fantasy author Erin Lindsey says that the original story feels dated, but that it displays a basic storytelling competence that the show never really achieves.
“The things that I didn’t like about the Martin novella were details, at the end of the day, but I thought the bones were good, and in a certain way this is the reverse,” Lindsey says in Episode 341 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Some of the details are cool, but they can’t make up for the fact that the bones aren’t there.”
Science fiction author Matthew Kressel notes that Nightflyers never really moves beyond recycling familiar elements from better movies and TV shows.
“To me it just felt like someone was unfamiliar with the tropes of science fiction,” he says. “I felt like they watched a lot of science fiction movies and TV and said, ‘Oh, that would be cool, that would be cool, that would be cool.’ But it never really cohered into a solid narrative.”
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley had high hopes for Nightflyers, but was disappointed to learn that George R. R. Martin was barely involved with the show. “He says that he heard they were making this show and he was like, ‘How can they do that? I haven’t given them the rights,’” Kirtley says. “And it turned out that he had sold the rights as part of the contract for the 1987 feature film and he hadn’t even realized it.
”TV writer Andrea Kail says that Nightflyers lacks any sort of creative vision, and that the show just seems to be trying to cash in on Martin’s name.
“The beauty of Game of Thrones is that [David] Benioff and [D.B.] Weiss were huge fans of the books,” she says. “They went after George and said, ‘We want to do this.’…
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