‘Dungeon Crawler Carl,’ ‘Skyward’ and 4 Other Must-Read Sci-Fi Novels Coming to TV

Science fiction has never exactly been an easy genre to bring to television. The worlds are often enormous, the concepts even bigger and the budgets potentially terrifying. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone from exploring the genre on TV. In fact, anyone searching for the best sci-fi books 2026 has to offer might want to start with the novels and literary universes now being transformed into some of television’s most ambitious upcoming shows.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the landmark 1984 cyberpunk novel that helped envision cyberspace before most people had even heard of the internet, is finally becoming a series. Blade Runner 2099 takes audiences back into the universe that began with Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, while The Expanse creators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck are looking toward another enormous interstellar saga with The Captive’s War.

Then there’s a newer generation of science-fiction hits making the leap. Brandon Sanderson is personally helping develop his Skyward series for television, while Matt Dinniman’s wonderfully bizarre Dungeon Crawler Carl — in which the destruction of Earth becomes an intergalactic reality show — is headed to Peacock.

Some are already made, others remain in development. But together they suggest television’s next great science-fiction worlds may already be sitting on our bookshelves.

‘Blade Runner 2099’ — based on ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (1968)

Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Doubleday
What it’s about: In a post-apocalyptic future, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is assigned to hunt down and “retire” escaped androids that are virtually indistinguishable from human beings. What begins as a futuristic detective story becomes Philip K. Dick’s exploration of empathy, memory, identity and the increasingly difficult question of what actually makes someone human.

Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner substantially reinvented Dick’s novel while retaining Deckard, the escaped artificial humans and many of its central philosophical questions. That film subsequently spawned Blade Runner 2049 and now Blade Runner 2099.

TV Adaptation: Rather than another adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner 2099 continues the screen universe inspired by it. The eight-episode Prime Video limited series is set 50 years after Blade Runner 2049 and stars Michelle Yeoh as Olwen, a replicant approaching the end of her life, and Hunter Schafer as Cora.

Silka Luisa serves as showrunner, Jonathan van Tulleken directs the opening episodes and Ridley Scott executive produces. All eight episodes are scheduled to premiere November 25, 2026.

Silka Luisa (creator/showrunner) says: “It was always considered as a limited series. Part of making the transition from film to TV is a really big jump for something that’s as cinematic as Blade Runner. And so, in that sense, it was really important to us that we told a story that, in a way, is like a movie — in the sense that there’s a beginning, there’s a middle and there’s an end. We went into it with Alcon, with all of our producing partners, knowing, okay, we really want to tell a complete story. And eight episodes — I mean, eight’s my lucky number. That’s the number I would have picked — but it felt like the right amount for the story we were planning on telling.”

“If you’re thinking about money while you’re just trying to imagine the world, it’s too debilitating. The process of trying to invent the story and come up with the most exciting way to tell the story is the first step. Then there’s a whole process afterwards where they figure out what that actually costs. And then, once you know the story you want to tell, you can go in and be like, ‘Okay, I can take this part out. I can move these pieces around,’ without damaging the most important aspects that you want to protect.”

‘Neuromancer’ (1984)

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Ace Books
What it’s about: Case was once a gifted computer hacker capable of entering cyberspace until former employers damaged his nervous system and took that ability away from him. He’s offered a chance to regain it in return for participating in an extraordinarily dangerous operation. Working alongside augmented mercenary Molly Millions, Case is pulled into a conspiracy involving enormously powerful artificial intelligences.

Gibson’s novel became one of the foundational works of cyberpunk, popularized the term “cyberspace,” and envisioned aspects of our relationship with computers and virtual worlds years before the World Wide Web existed.

TV Adaptation: Apple TV has produced a 10-episode adaptation starring Callum Turner as Case and Briana Middleton as Molly, alongside Mark Strong as Armitage and Peter Sarsgaard as John Ashpool. Graham Roland is showrunner, JD Dillard directs the first three episodes and Gibson is among the executive producers. Neuromancer premieres January 22, 2027, with its first two episodes, followed by weekly episodes through March 19.

Showrunner Graham Roland says: “I think 42 years ago, this book felt like pure science fiction. And Gibson famously coined the term cyberspace to describe a digital world where people in the book go to escape and to interact with. And he did all this before the internet existed. He wrote about the collision of artificial intelligence and human intelligence before artificial intelligence existed. And now we’re living in a world 42 years later where these things are part of all of our everyday lives. And so it felt like an appropriate time for us to revisit the text and to put it in a new light now that these things are actually here.”

‘The Captive’s War’— beginning with The Mercy of Gods (2024)

Author: James S.A. Corey (pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck)
Publisher: Orbit
What it’s about: Humanity discovers that it occupies a very small place in the universe when the enormously powerful Carryx empire conquers the human world of Anjiin. Research scientist Dafyd Alkhor and a group of fellow survivors are taken prisoner and transported into a vast imperial system populated by other conquered species. Captives must demonstrate their usefulness to the Carryx or face extinction. The story launches an epic about humanity attempting to survive within — and potentially resist — an alien civilization of almost unimaginable size and power.

TV Adaptation: Abraham and Franck have reunited with The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar and director Breck Eisner through their company Expanding Universe. A television adaptation of The Captive’s War is in development with Amazon MGM Studios. Shankar is attached as showrunner, Eisner as director, and Abraham, Franck and Shankar are involved in writing. This is in development and has not yet received a series order, so we need to make that distinction explicit.

Daniel Abraham says: “The Captive’s War is kind of the other side of space opera from The Expanse. The Expanse is Alfred Bester and Larry Niven and Arthur [C.] Clarke, and this grounded science fiction that really kind of considers that part of a history. But there’s a whole different realm of science fiction that is Dune and Left Hand of Darkness and all of these things that are very far future, very broad canvases. And we’ve moved over there to do this.”

“Ty Franck pitched, ‘What if you re-envisioned the biblical Book of Daniel as epic science fiction, [where] you have this person who is taken by the great empire the way that the slaves were taken to Babylon, and incorporated into the mechanisms of empire?’ And how you deal with being the functionary of your oppressor and also maintaining yourself and maintaining your view and maintaining your struggle against oppression in that context. I thought, ‘Yeah, that sounds awesome. We should do that.’” 

‘Skyward’ (2018)

Author: Brandon Sanderson
Publisher: Delacorte Press
What it’s about: Spensa Nightshade desperately wants to become a fighter pilot defending humanity’s last refuge on the planet Detritus from relentless alien attacks. There’s one major obstacle beyond simply getting into flight school: Spensa’s father was a pilot branded a coward after apparently abandoning his squadron during battle. She enters flight training determined both to prove herself and redeem her family’s reputation. What Spensa eventually discovers raises much larger questions about her father, humanity’s enemy and why humans are trapped on Detritus in the first place.

TV Adaptation: Tomorrow Studios is developing Skyward as a television series. Sanderson is taking an unusually hands-on role, co-writing the pilot with Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, whose credits include Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. All three are executive producers. At present, Skyward does not have a network or streaming home and has not received a series order. The pilot is being developed with the intention of taking the project to buyers.

Janci Patterson (co-writer of the Blightfall spin-off from Skyward): “Skyward is the ‘boy and his dragon’ trope, except it’s a girl with her spaceship, which is how Brandon originally pitched it to me back before he wrote it. I thought that was brilliant. You’ve got this girl and her spaceship, and they’re being attacked by aliens. They’re stuck on this planet and don’t really know why they’re being attacked. Then the story expands into these humans learning about alien cultures and having adventures on new planets.”  

‘Consider Phlebas’ (1987)

Author: Iain M. Banks
Publisher: Macmillan
What it’s about: The first published novel in Banks’ Culture series takes place against a galactic war between two radically different civilizations. The Culture is an enormously advanced post-scarcity society in which biological beings live alongside immensely powerful artificial intelligences called Minds. Its opponent, the Idiran Empire, is an expansionist civilization driven by religious belief. Shape-shifting mercenary Bora Horza Gobuchul fights on the Idiran side and is sent to retrieve a Culture Mind stranded on a forbidden planet. The unusual twist is that Banks introduces his seemingly utopian Culture largely through the eyes of someone who distrusts it—particularly its reliance on artificial intelligence.

TV Adaptation: Amazon MGM Studios is developing a new television adaptation written and executive produced by Charles Yu, creator of Interior Chinatown. Chloé Zhao is executive producing through Book of Shadows, alongside Plan B’s Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner and Banks’ widow, Adele Banks. This is Amazon’s second attempt to adapt Consider Phlebas. An earlier version announced in 2018 with Dennis Kelly attached was abandoned in 2020. The current project is an entirely new attempt. It remains in development without a series order, announced cast or premiere date.

Iain Banks (who died in 2013) says: “Partly it [the creation of the Culture] was in reaction to a lot of the SF I was reading at the time. The British stuff mostly seemed a bit miserablist and the US’s too right wing. I wanted SF that combined what I regarded as the best of both: the thoughtfulness and sense of proportion of the UK’s and the energy and optimism of the US brand.”

“The way the Culture came about initially was as—I thought at the time—a single-use solution to a particular problem. I was getting ready to write Use of Weapons and I knew that Zakalwe was this sort of ultimate warrior guy, just very martially able, but I wanted him to be on the side of the good guys somehow. Squaring that circle was the problem, so I came up with the idea of the Culture as his ultimate employers: a society basically on the side of the angels but willing to use people like Zakalwe (utopia spawning few warriors, as the later-written poem says) to do its dirty but justified work. The ‘justified’ bit always having something to do with statistics; from the beginning the Culture had to be able to prove—rather than simply assert—that it was generally doing the right thing, even when it interfered without permission in other societies. That was it, initially, but then the Culture proved to be the nucleus around which all my other until then rather nebulous ideas started to cluster and take shape, and it just developed—naturally, it felt—by itself, from there.”

‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ (2020)

Author: Matt Dinniman
Publisher: Originally self-published; later print editions published by Ace
What it’s about: Carl is outside in his underwear with his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning Persian cat, Princess Donut, when aliens effectively demolish human civilization. The survivors are offered an opportunity to enter an enormous underground dungeon constructed beneath the remains of Earth. There’s a catch: the entire thing is an intergalactic reality television program. Carl and Donut become contestants in an increasingly lethal series of dungeon levels filled with monsters, traps, other survivors and an AI with a decidedly unusual personality — all while trying to build an audience among the billions of aliens watching them. The series combines science fiction, apocalyptic adventure, LitRPG, satire and extremely dark comedy.

TV Adaptation: Peacock has officially greenlit a live-action Dungeon Crawler Carl television series. Chris Yost, whose credits include Thor: Ragnarok and The Mandalorian, is writing and executive producing. Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door is producing with Universal Content Productions/Universal Studio Group. Unlike several projects on this list, therefore, Dungeon Crawler Carl has moved beyond merely having its rights optioned or a pilot being developed.

Matt Dinniman says: “This book (Dungeon Crawler Carl) has always been kind of difficult to elevator pitch, but here’s my best one. Aliens come and destroy the world, killing most of the population in a single instant. Amongst the survivors are a man, Carl, and his ex-girfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. The aliens have turned the planet into the set of the galaxy’s highest-rated reality game show, Dungeon Crawler World. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, become contestants on the show, and are forced to fight for their lives while a galaxy of viewers watch their progress. Donut the cat quickly 1) Learns the Magic Missile spell and 2) Becomes a fan favorite.”

“I never intended for this to be a funny story, but the concept along with some of the characters—specifically Princess Donut (who is given sapience and the ability to talk in an early chapter)—allows for some really bizarre and ultimately funny scenarios. I don’t go out of my way to say ‘Okay, that scene was pretty dark. Let’s make a funny scene now.’ Instead, I try to rely on the characters themselves to get from point A to B, and humor is oftentimes a major coping mechanism. Plus, they are on a game show. The bad guys running the whole thing are also using their own brand of sadistic humor to keep the audience entertained.” (Grim Dark Magazine)