SEVENEVES at Legendary
Above: Illustration of Cradle by Christian Pearce for Weta Workshop
On Friday the announcement went out here and in some other entertainment biz outlets that I’m in business with Legendary Television to produce an adaptation of SEVENEVES. Right now there’s not a lot to say about it, since paperwork just got finished up, but I’ll use this Substack as a place to talk about progress whenever there’s something to disclose.
SEVENEVES had its origins at least as far back as 2004, when I was working at Blue Origin and thinking a lot about the practicalities of space flight. It has long been commonplace in big science fiction franchises to posit some kind of faster-than-light propulsion technology that makes it possible to journey between solar systems in just a few hours or days. But the reality is that no such technology exists, or is likely to, and so we are probably never going to leave this solar system. Was it possible, I asked myself, to create a science fictional universe just as rich and exciting as the big-name franchises but confined to one solar system?
On the face of it, this seems like a brutal constraint on what science fiction writers can write about. But constraints make art. James S. A. Corey’s THE EXPANSE, Andy Weir’s THE MARTIAN, and Daniel Suarez’s DELTA V are just a few examples of great storytelling and world building set closer to home.
Anyway, big pan-galactic franchises rarely take full advantage of the scope available to them. In the Star Wars universe, Dagobah is a few square miles of swamp biome. Hoth is a few square miles of polar icecap, and so on. Real earthlike planets would not consist entirely of desert, swamp, or any other one specific biome!
But if all you need, to tell your story, is a few square miles, you can fit that into an artificial space habitat. And the larger story around how that habitat came to be built provides more opportunities for world building.
Anyway, if things go well I’ll have more to say about this as the project moves forward. I haven’t been in touch with the gang at Legendary recently, but the usual way these things work is that a script needs to be written (not by me) and the idea needs to be developed to the point where it can be pitched to a network or streaming service. Famously, the development process can take a while. I’ll follow Legendary’s lead in making any future announcements, but when it happens I’ll make them here.
This is good news. What I liked most about the televised version of EXPANSE were it's pre-pan galactic seasons. Of course the whole thing was alot of fun to experience on screen. The books are fun to read too. But I am realistic and like to see actual physics represented in fiction. So, in too many words, 'Cool, looking forward to watching SEVENEVES on screen.' CG (historian writing from Tokyo)
I was listening to a Radiolab episode yesterday that began with speculation that the Tunguska event might have been caused by a micro (pico actually, I guess) black hole. Immediately wondered if that idea was involved in coming up with the basic idea for the book as “tiny black hole” was one of the potential explanations for “the agent.”
If this comes out any time soon I may have to wait to watch it unfortunately. This is the book I always have to psych myself up to read because the first half never fails to sink me into depression. World events of late are depressing enough as it is so I might not have the resources.
My guess was always that this book would lead to an RPG. It seems like such a perfect candidate for that. Heck, I almost assumed you wrote it as a precursor to translating it into that medium.