5 Visionary Sci-Fi Novels Poised to Become Apple TV’s Next Big Franchise

For nearly a decade, Apple TV+ has cemented its status as the definitive home for prestige science fiction. It began with cinematic epics like For All Mankind and See, matured into the cerebral depths of Foundation and Severance, and redefined world-building with Silo and Dark Matter. By trusting audiences to follow intricate details across seasons, the platform built an empire of complex, philosophical television that leverages spectacle to explore grand ideas rather than existing for its own sake. Now, Apple TV+ is venturing into science fiction’s most eccentric subgenres—from post-humanist dystopia in Pluribus and Lovecraftian horror in Widow’s Bay to speculative neo-noir in Sugar and cyberpunk in Neuromancer. With so many of its biggest hits being adaptations, this expanding remit presents a massive opportunity to bring epic literature to the screen. From 1Q84 to Children of Time, these novels are primed to become Apple TV+’s most ambitious franchise yet.

1 ‘1Q84’

By Haruki Murakami

1Q84 follows two individuals who shared a fleeting moment as children, only to find themselves two decades later in a surreal, alternate Tokyo where reality has subtly shifted and two moons hang in the sky. Aomame, a fitness instructor and assassin who targets abusive men for a wealthy dowager, and Tengo, a math teacher and ghostwriter, find their separate lives increasingly intertwined as they navigate a sinister religious cult and enigmatic supernatural beings. A parallel-universe mystery steeped in magical realism, it is ultimately a metaphysical love story where mutual desire and faith can alter the fabric of reality itself.

Spanning three volumes and exceeding a thousand pages, Haruki Murakami’s masterwork could never be condensed into a feature film without losing its core identity and devolving into a standard action or mystery thriller. However, it possesses limitless potential as multi-season episodic television—the ideal medium for visualizing an exposition-heavy narrative. This format allows the epic dual narratives to layer and build, the deep-seated philosophy to earn its merit, and the magical realism to expand on its own terms. While Murakami is famously choosy about adaptations, Apple TV+’s auteur-first mentality might be the rare opportunity that persuades him to bring his work to the small screen.

2 ‘Children of Time’

By Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time chronicles humanity’s attempt to relocate across the stars and its subsequent encounters with advanced species on distant worlds. Following a terraforming mission that went catastrophically wrong centuries earlier, these alien races have evolved into highly intelligent civilizations. With each first contact, the trauma inflicted by human hubris is laid bare, and the vast disconnect between different forms of intelligence forces humankind to reconsider its understanding of society, identity, and sentience. As the struggle for survival becomes increasingly interconnected, the series questions whether cooperation and radical empathy can overcome the dangerous instincts toward domination that have shaped intelligent life from its inception.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s four-book series is uniquely suited to television, as each installment expands the universe rather than simply continuing the story, providing the perfect foundation for a long-running series steeped in lore. What makes it a standout in a crowded field of sci-fi epics is its meticulous depiction of alien civilizations and its intrinsic weirdness that lingers in the consciousness long after reading. Preserving the core oddities of the source material instead of softening them requires a level of creative fearlessness, making it an ideal franchise for Apple TV+ in its adventurous era—one with the potential to alter how hard sci-fi is brought to television.

3 ‘The Deluge’

By Stephen Markley

The Deluge opens in an alternate 2013 rife with political discord and extreme weather, where a scientist issuing a public warning about a climatological tipping point finds his message ignored, his career sidelined, and his life threatened. What follows is an epic journey through three decades of American collapse, experienced through a sprawling cast of activists, politicians, experts, executives, extremists, and ordinary people. As the crisis intensifies, political paralysis and government failure trigger economic and societal upheaval, making the consequences of inaction impossible to ignore and forcing characters to converge in a high-stakes reckoning of what they are willing to sacrifice for humanity’s future.

Stephen Markley’s novel already possesses the makings of a prestige ensemble series: a massive cast, power struggles amid deep personal relationships, warring American factions, and escalating disasters. Markley, who currently serves as a writer on Hulu’s hit series Paradise, is uniquely placed to tackle his 900-page source material in the slow-drip fashion that Dan Fogelman has mastered over the last three seasons, especially considering the 27-year timeline. What makes the novel so appealing for television is how it tackles its story from every angle, bringing a fresh perspective to a world that mirrors our own but extends into an unfamiliar sci-fi future, making it feel both incredibly plausible and urgent.

4 ‘Sea of Tranquility’

By Emily St. John Mandel

The four timelines in Sea of Tranquility are linked by a single anomaly—a jarring glitch in reality that causes three people to experience a flash of darkness followed by the echoing sound of a violin in an airship terminal. From a British royal exiled to the Canadian wilderness in 1912, to a New Yorker searching for a long-lost friend in 2020, to a moon-based writer on a book tour in 2203, three lives are upended by an unexpected event connecting them across time and space. Meanwhile, a time-traveling detective investigating the anomaly in 2401 becomes increasingly certain that reality is a simulation. This sweeping temporal mystery is a devastating examination of fate, isolation, and the transcendence of human connection across all imaginable distances.

A faithful adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s book would work best in a limited-series format, requiring a steady hand to nail the eerie details that echo across centuries and a tight focus to deliver the canny, quiet interior lives of its characters within its vast visual scope. However, the book’s true franchise potential lies in its connection to The Glass Hotel. While the earlier work is a realistic white-collar literary crime drama, it adds tremendous color to the characters and plot of Sea of Tranquility. Together, these two books could tell a much more expansive story that dabbles in genre-bending and literary boundaries, perfectly suited to being an Apple TV+ franchise.

5 ‘The Bone Clocks’

By David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks tells the extraordinary story of Holly Sykes, who runs away from home as a teenager in 1984 and begins experiencing unexplained visions that convince her a secret supernatural war is being waged in an invisible realm. The sweeping novel is divided into six sections, each spanning a decade, tracking Holly from a rebellious teen to an elderly grandmother as she becomes entangled with immortal beings using her as a pawn. Narrated by Holly in the first and last sections, with other individuals narrating the intervening decades, the tale begins as 80s realism, twists into supernatural horror, and ultimately leads to a dystopian future on the brink of collapse where Holly must finally end the war only she can see.

David Mitchell is a truly one-of-a-kind author whose vast, interconnected body of work is incredibly unsuited to the brevity of a feature film—much like Cloud Atlas—but his spectacular writing lends itself beautifully to a long-running television series. Each section of The Bone Clocks provides enough material to carry multiple episodes or an entire season, with Holly serving as a strong, unforgettable anchoring protagonist and the supernatural lore begging to be turned into a mystery box. A new leading character is introduced at the top of each time shift to keep the narrative fresh. Most importantly, it starts as a coming-of-age tale, morphs into an occult thriller, then becomes a dystopian journey, offering something for every type of Apple TV+ viewer in its franchise-ready story.

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