George R.R. Martin teaming up with Star Trek's Kalinda Vazquez for new HBO show
News today from TV-producer-who-also-happens-to-own-a-typewriter George R.R. Martin, who confirmed reports that he’s developing a new series at HBO, which is what George R.R. Martin does now, and not anything else you might be casually screaming into a pillow about him not doing. Specifically, Martin posted on his blog this afternoon about plans to turn his old pal Roger Zelazny’s novel Roadmarks into a TV series, working with Star Trek: Discovery and Fear The Walking Dead producer Kalinda Vazquez, who’ll serve as showrunner for the series.
Published in 1979, Roadmarks is dense and complex even by the standards of Zelazny’s biggest hit, the massive, multiverse-spanning Amber books. A standalone novel presented in semi-non-chronological order, the book centers on “The Road,” a mystical pathway that allows travelers upon it to move through time, and not just in the “slowly trudging toward our own graves second by second” sense. The book’s protagonist is temporal explorer Red Dorakeen, who is accompanied on his journeys through the timestream by, among other things, a sentient Walt Whitman poetry collection. (We did say.) The book alternates between largely linear chapters telling Red’s story, and a series of “Two” chapters that jump wildly around in chronology following the lives of secondary characters, which, yes, sounds like catnip to prestige drama TV, which never met a timeline it couldn’t goof up a little more in service of profitably confusing its viewers.
Martin has been an energetic pursuer of TV projects since even before Game Of Thrones made him one of the most bankable writers in the field of not writing novels very much, noting in his post that the very first script he ever got made was an adaptation of Zelazny’s works. (His other projects in active development at the moment include more than one Game Of Thrones prequels, most notably House Of The Dragon, also at HBO.) Vazquez, meanwhile, got some of her first credits on Once Upon A Time, and worked with Martin several years earlier on an attempted adaptation of his werewolf novella “The Skin Trade.” Roadmarks currently has a pilot order at HBO.