12 Fantasy Novels That Deserve To Be Adapted To TV That Aren't Game Of Thrones

Fantasy is once again resurgent on our television screens. "House of the Dragon," a spin-off of the mega-hit "Game of Thrones," is in the middle of its first season. Meanwhile, Amazon has launched "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," one of the most expensive television productions ever made. As a fan of genre fiction, I suppose I should be celebrating. Instead, I can't help but be frustrated. The genre of fantasy includes countless weird and fascinating works, including the award-winning "Broken Earth" trilogy published in just the past few years. Yet several of the novels being adapted are epic fantasy stories published in the 1990s. What about everything else?

The following is a list of fantasy works I believe would make excellent television. Some are set in other worlds, others are set in ours. Some are short stories, others are long-running works of webfiction. I sought to strike a balance between canonical classics, recent masterpieces, and oddball picks. As far as I know, none of them have been optioned. I took care to note in each entry what challenges there might be in bringing these works to the screen, and how the cast and crew of each production might overcome those challenges. If you have not yet read everything on this list, I can vouch for all of them; however, one may require you to learn Chinese.

That there has not yet been a television adaptation of Guy Gavriel Kay's work is befuddling. Not only is Kay an award-winning fantasy author whose novels precede "Game of Thrones" in their evocation of real history, he's also an author with a direct connection to the Tolkien family, having assisted Christopher Tolkien in editing "The Silmarillion." You would think that executives would be tripping over each other in a rush to adapt his work to the screen. Perhaps the problem is that Kay himself isn't much for writing multi-entry stories. While his novels share a setting, the majority are standalones featuring distinct characters whose tales are over and done with by the end of each book.

"The Sarantine Mosaic" is an exception. A duology of novels about empire, chariot-racing, and art-making, it's a fan-favorite among Kay's body of work. It serves as a historical prequel to the similarly beloved "Lions of Al Rassan," providing the production team with a follow-up project if a "Mosaic" adaptation is successful. There's even a bit of numinous, world-shaking magic, although Kay's work tends to be even more restrained than George R.R. Martin in this regard. Kay is a deft hand at both writing memorable characters and building tangible worlds, and "The Sarantine Mosaic" represents his most sustained effort until his recent trilogy starting with "A Brightness Long Ago."

Robin Hobb's books follow a simple formula: Take a flawed but sympathetic character and have them eat dirt for 800 pages at a time until they are forced to change out of necessity. That might sound like painful reading material, but fantasy fans of a certain age devoured Hobb's books. She is very good at putting the reader directly into the shoes of her characters, developing them through what they notice as well as what they leave out of the stories they tell. Her initial "Farseer Trilogy" does a fantastic job fleshing out its protagonist Fitz, subjecting him to an adolescence that feels as brutal and frustrating as the real thing — even as it is exaggerated beyond belief. Later series, like the "Liveship Traders" trilogy, increased the number of characters in play while further perfecting Hobb's craft.

The author's novels lend themselves well to television for several reasons. She prioritizes complex, messy characters over epic plots, providing plenty of great material for actors to dig into. The magic in her settings is prominent but more often includes body-swapping, telepathy, and brainwashing than fireballs or dragons (although dragons do eventually appear). She's written many novels running for hundreds of pages, most of which are set in the same world. Many of these books include prominent animal parts, but if HBO kept the direwolves in "Game of Thrones," they might as well give Fitz a pet wolf on television.

John Crowley's "Little, Big" begins with the marriage of a man named Smoky Barnable to a woman named Daily Alice Drinkwater. Smoky travels to live with Alice and her family in a house that is many houses. Over the course of the novel, the reader comes to learn of the many members of the Drinkwater family, the strange coincidences that dog their footsteps, and an old contract binding them to a future that has not yet been written. "Little, Big" is a love story, a family story, and a fairy story. At times it's a weirdly prescient political tale. And at the very end, it is a novel about the apocalypse, and the function that stories serve. "LIttle, Big" is slow, but the final pages hit with the strength of a star collapsing into a black hole. Few other fantasy novels are as successful at evoking the numinous without ever losing sight of its characters.

"Little, Big" is baggy enough that a film adaptation would likely come up short. A television series would allow for episodic storytelling, giving the novel's many characters and timelines a chance to breathe. The danger of a "Little, Big" adaptation lies in diluting its heady sense of awe into a facile twee-ness. The strength of Crowley's novel is that the world of Faerie lurking beneath its pages inspires fear and awe as much as it does beauty. An adaptation that recognized this, while still centering the relationships of its characters and their small joys, could really be something special.

"Tai Sui" is a webnovel by Priest, a prominent web novel author whose most acclaimed works are to be found in the "danmei" (or "boy's love") scene. Her works "Guardian" and "Word of Honor" have been already been adapted to television. Compared to these, "Tai Sui" deemphasizes the romance element, but is perhaps even more ambitious. It represents her attempt at a "cultivation fantasy," telling the story of a foppish noble named Xi Ping, who is unexpectedly selected among the people of his city to train as an immortal in the mountains. It's a chance that many his age would kill for, an opportunity to transcend the limitations of the body and attain unlimited power. But Priest is too sneaky to give the reader a straightforward power fantasy, and so Xi Ping is soon possessed by the ghost of an "evil cultivator" known as Tai Sui. As the secrets of the world unravel and Xi Ping is radically changed by his experiences, "Tai Sui" imagines a society in revolt against the conventions of Chinese pulp fiction.

Featuring grand-scale set pieces, a large cast of characters, and some memorable creatures, "Tai Sui" would certainly be a challenging story to adapt to TV. But then, "The Untamed" survived the transition to screen (adapted from "Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation" by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu) to become the biggest pop culture export from China in years. "Tai Sui" represents an opportunity to take an even bigger swing, just as danmei becomes increasingly popular abroad. (Assuming an upcoming TV adaptation of Priest's "Sha Po Lang" doesn't beat it to the punch.)

Christopher Priest is best known today for his novel "The Prestige," which was adapted in 2006 into a well-liked Christopher Nolan film. But Priest has written many other novels, all of which interrogate the stories we tell ourselves and others. Most of these are relatively short and feature big, reality-shattering twists, making them a better fit for film than television. But his 2011 novel "The Islanders" is an exception, if only because of its unusual format.

The novel is an alphabetical travel guide to what Priest calls the "Dream Archipelago," a cluster of islands whose names and distance from each other are mutable. A central mystery winds through this guide, with a solution that is tantalizingly within reach and yet seemingly contradictory. Yet "The Islanders" is as much a short story collection as it is a novel, with plenty of time for detours (or are they?) into art criticism, dry comedy, and bone-chilling horror. When Ursula K. Le Guin says "[t]he thryme lives on the island of Aubrac Grande, and you really do not want to meet it," believe her!

R.F. Kuang made her name with "The Poppy War" and its sequels, a ruthless epic fantasy trilogy riffing on 20th century Chinese history. Her newest work is "Babel," a novel that embodies the cutting edge of modern genre fiction. It is a story about academia, drawing on Kuang's own experiences as a teacher and a student. It is also a story about empire, and whether reform is a practical or hopelessly foolish means of changing corrupt systems. "Babel" speaks to the beauty of language, but also to how language is rigorously controlled by a system of power that persists today.

While "Game of Thrones" sought to invest the epic fantasy of Martin's time within the texture of real history, several prominent writers in modern fantasy ask direct questions about the here and now. What does it mean to live and thrive within an imperial system? How does one navigate the ruins of its collapse? Can a fairer, more equitable system be constructed from the rubble, built by and for the marginalized? There are authors right now busy imagining what that imperfect utopia might look like. At the same time, there are also artists like Kuang who have occupied themselves with tearing into those fantasies constructed, deliberately or unknowingly, by the makers of our current imperial reality. Considering the industry of think-pieces that sprung up around the "Game of Thrones" television series, I would hope that a "Babel" adaptation would frustrate and inspire just as many people.