Nightflyers is a George RR Martin sci-fi binge in search of a fandom
Netflix's new space horror series takes an early story from the man behind Game of Thrones and twists it into something else entirely
It's 2093 and a ragtag team of scientists are onboard mysterious spaceship the Nightflyer, on a mission to make contact with aliens. It's 1984 and George R.R. Martin is signing over the TV rights to his 1980 novella Nightflyers – a fact he apparently won't realise until 2016, when the TV version of Nightflyers is in production with the Syfy channel.
And now it's 2019, and the sci-fi horror series inspired by Martin's early work has just landed on Netflix in the UK. But is it any good? More importantly, is it Game of Thrones good?
Nightflyers, the 1980 George R.R. Martin novella, is slight but not in a bad way – a haunted-house-in-space story, full of alien teases and populated by a small cast of paranoid characters. Nightflyers, the show on Netflix, has a big crew, space sunsets, a crazy bee lady and a forest in a spaceship. It's also dark in all senses of the word, violent and, at least in the first two episodes, almost entirely free of comic relief. There is a bit of sex, though (in the book, too, the secondary characters are constantly, somewhat indifferently hooking up).
If you're looking for another epic saga of meticulous plotting and treachery, this is not it. It's rather a straight-up, scary sci-fi that creator and showrunner Jeff Buhler has expanded into a ten-episode season with strong hints of more to come.
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When considering how else you could spend your sci-fi time within Netflix (Black Mirror, Annihilation, Arrival), the first episodes of Nightflyers don't stand up to the greats on character, dialogue or plot, with homages to 2001 and The Shining a bit too on the nose. But on the positive side, its neural links, holograms and memory suites look fairly slick, it's not short on guilty pleasure jump scares, and it grapples with some pretty big questions about first contact with other life forms. Essentially: if you're looking for something intense and bloody and a bit trippy, you could do better, but you could also do a lot worse.
It's fair to say Nightflyers hasn't convinced critics in the US since it came out there in December - it has a 33 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes - but, as often happens, audiences who have watched it so far have been much kinder, resulting in an IMDb rating of 6.1/10 and a Google ratings score of '87 percent liked this show'. So who exactly is Nightflyers for? And can it find its people?
Showrunners and other stakeholders are no doubt hoping that the Netflix effect will build up a fanbase for more of the author's early work; Nightflyers is set in Martin's 'The Thousand Worlds' universe, which is also featured in dozens of other sci-fi short stories that he wrote in the 1970s and 80s. Yes, that's a thousand worlds; listen closely, you can just hear the TV franchises forming.
But first, Nightflyers needs to prove its worth. To gear up for the show, the original 23,000-word novella was published in the UK in 2018 as a hardback book with elegant, otherworldly illustrations by David Palumbo. A TV tie-in edition is due on February 7. "We wanted to give readers a chance to experience it before the TV show airs," says Natasha Bardon, publishing director at Harper Voyager. "What's so great about Netflix is that shows are able to grow a huge following overnight and bring books to a whole new audience."
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Elio Garcia, co-founder of Westeros.org, the biggest A Song of Fire and Ice/Game of Thrones fan site, says that fans of that world have gone back to Martin's other works to explore his writing, themes and approaches to storytelling in his "second most significant universe" The Thousand Worlds, but that this doesn't guarantee anything for Nightflyers.
"I admit I've not seen any evidence of a particular fandom around Nightflyers at this time," he says, "but I think this has a lot to do with the fact that SyFy in the US, and now Netflix elsewhere, released it in a way that's aimed at binging rather than water-cooler talk. It's a very different model from Game of Thrones and other shows, which are weekly events and give a lot of time for fan speculation and discussion. I'd guess Nightflyers will need word of a second series order before a real fandom can develop."
Eoin Macken, who plays astrophysicist Karl D'Branin in Nightflyers, says he thinks fans will either love or hate it. "This type of show, people really adore it or it's not quite their cup of tea, because that's what science fiction is – it's very divisive," he says. "You either have a visceral reaction to something or you don't. The show is quite crazy and quite weird. It explores some big themes and goes in some bananas directions, which is what's fun about it."
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Macken also confirms that Martin, who is credited as an executive producer but is tied to his HBO contract, wasn't exactly hanging around the set. "No, he wasn't," he says. "He was there when they did initial screenings. Jeff spoke to him a lot, not me personally. We communicated via a group WhatsApp."
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That's not particularly surprising, given George R.R. Martin is a very busy man. If you binge Nightflyers in a weekend or it isn't quite your thing, then take solace in the fact that there are no fewer than five Game of Thrones prequels in development at HBO.
Nightflyers is on Netflix from February 1
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