While you might be bracing yourself for the end of “Game Of Thrones,” which is now confirmed to finish after season eight in 2018, fans of high fantasy and George R.R. Martin may have a new, massive shared universe coming to the small screen to dive into.
READ MORE: Recap: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Season 6, Episode 9 ‘Battle Of The Bastards’ Goes Wildin’ Out
Over the weekend, the author announced on LiveJournal that Universal Cable Productions has snapped up the rights to his long-running “Wild Cards” anthology series. It’s essentially a massive project spread out across books, graphic novels and role playing games penned by a group of thirty writers, for which Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass serve as the brain trust. Basically, this could be much, much bigger than Westeros. Here’s the synopsis:
The shared world of the Wild Cards diverged from our own on September 15, 1946 when an alien virus was released in the skies over Manhattan, and spread across an unsuspecting Earth. Of those infected, 90% died horribly, drawing the black queen, 9% were twisted and deformed into jokers, while a lucky 1% became blessed with extraordinary and unpredictable powers and became aces. The world was never the same.
For those familiar with “Wild Cards,” Martin is already promising that they’ll see Croyd Crenson and The Sleeper, and that the potential size of this universe knows no bounds.
” ‘Wild Cards’ is a series of books, graphic novels, games… but most of all it is a universe, as large and diverse and exciting as the comic book universes of Marvel and DC (though somewhat grittier, and considerably more realistic and more consistent), with an enormous cast of characters both major and minor,” Martin wrote. “There are thousands of stories to be told in the world of the ‘Wild Cards,’ and [producer] Gregory Noveck and Melinda M. Snodgrass and UPC hope to be able to tell many of them.”
The plan is for “Wild Cards” to be “the first of several interlocking series.” Thoughts? If you’re fan of the series, hit up the comments section and let us know if you think this will work on the small screen. [io9]
Not to pick nits but Croyd Crenson IS The Sleeper. They aren’t two different characters.