Nightflyers

Novella

Originally written in 1980, the 23,000-word novella was published by Analog Science Fiction and Fact. In 1981, at the request of his editor at the time, James Frenkel, Martin expanded the story into a 30,000-word piece, which was published by Dell Publishing together with Vernor Vinge's True Names as part of their Binary Star series. In the extended version, Martin supplied additional backstory on the various characters, and named several secondary characters which were not named in the original version.

Nightflyers is set in the same fictional "Thousand Worlds" universe as several of Martin's other works, including Dying of the Light, Sandkings, A Song for Lya, "The Way of Cross and Dragon", "With Morning Comes Mistfall" and the stories collected in Tuf Voyaging.

In 1981, Nightflyers won the Locus Award for best novella and the Analog Readers Poll for best novella/novelette, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novella. The novella was also the recipient of the 1983 Seiun Award in Japan for foreign short fiction.

Collection

The collection is the fifth by Martin and was first published in December 1985. It contains the following stories and novellas:

Film

The film is about a group of scientists who begin a space voyage to find a mysterious alien creature, and in the process are victimized by the ship's malevolent computer. It was directed by Robert Collector, and stars Catherine Mary Stewart, Michael Praed, James Avery and John Standing. According to Martin, writer/producer Robert Jaffe probably adapted his script from the shorter novella version, since all of the secondary characters had different names than the ones he chose in the expanded version. The film grossed $1,149,470.

TV series

In 2017, a pilot for a possible TV series based on Nightflyers was being developed by Syfy. The series would be based on the 1987 film, with Jaffe serving as one of the producers. The script for the pilot was written by Jeff Buhler. Martin will not be involved in the production or writing for the new series, since his contract with HBO contains an exclusivity clause.