Space horror is a genre that isn't touched by television very often. SyFy's Nightflyers revisits the genre, and it gets many things right.
For one thing, unlike the 1980s movie, it doesn't whitewash the character of Melantha Jhirl - a character who was also whitewashed in the 1985 cover art (Martin was unhappy, but not famous enough yet to argue). In this case, although Martin had little involvement with the series, he did reach out and demand a black actress. Which gave us the able Jodie Turner-Smith. Martin himself was baffled as to how they were going to get a TV show out of a novella, but thinks they did a good job.
One big change is that the Nightflyer is apparently within the solar system, there's not much in the way of interstellar travel, and Earth is dying.
It's the ending that didn't feel right.
Nightflyers is cosmic horror. It's man versus the void. It's about sanity. It might even say something about long distance space travel. There's also some stuff in there about race, about xenophobia, about our natural fear of the other.
But ultimately, the volcryn are incomprehensible, space is huge, and we're all going to die.
The end of the ten episode season? It felt like 2001.
Now this may be that it's not the end, that they're going somewhere with this. After all, they have the full TV rights.
But it left me feeling that the writers missed the point. It left the entire thing feeling more like Alien (don't get me wrong, Alien remains perhaps my favorite space horror movie) than Lovecraft in space.
(Also, if you want to do a Martin space TV series, how about Tuf Voyaging? A flawed, very human, but intriguing protagonist, lots of possibilities for stories even once you've used the ones he wrote, and cats. Cats.)
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