Read these 8 game-changing books before their TV adaptations arrive

Neuromancer is a pioneering sci-fi novel by William Gibson. Published in 1984, it follows a hacker named Case who gets caught up in a globe-trotting conspiracy. The book helped popularize elements that would go on to define the cyberpunk genre, including the idea of a 3-D cyberspace, human beings augmenting themselves with high-tech attachments, and a dystopian urban environment divided between the haves and the have-notes.

Apple is a huge fan of sci-fi, so there’s every reason to hope they’ll do right by this pioneering work. The show kicks off on Jan. 22, 2027.

Credit: Ace

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a sci-fi book that became enormously popular after it dropped on shelves in 2020. It follows Carl, a United States Coast Guard veteran, and a cat named Princess Donut, who are two of many participants in an interstellar reality show where they have to make their way through a perilous dungeon.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a funny, clever book that incorporates elements from computer RPGs, which is an ongoing trend in genre fiction these days. The show is being developed for Peacock. There’s no cast or release date announced as of yet.

Credit: Penguin Books

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s classic 1813 novel about a young, free-spirited woman named Elizabeth Bennet who crosses paths with a seemingly egotistical aristocrat named Mr. Darcy. Perhaps the enemies-to-lovers novel, Pride and Prejudice has been widely read for centuries and has been adapted for the screen many, many times. This latest version will star Emma Corrin (The Crown) as Elizabeth and Jack Lowden (Slow Horses) as Darcy.

If you’re a fan of Jane Austen, you know there can never be enough adaptations of her work. The new show is set to drop on Netflix sometime in 2026.

Credit: Entangled: Red Tower Books

As Dungeon Crawler Carl is a good example of the popular LitRPG genre, Fourth Wing is one of the leading romantasy books, meaning books that mix romance with fantasy.

Fourth Wing is the first of five planned books in the Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros. It’s about a young woman named Violet who is forced by her mother to train at a brutal military academy to become a dragon-rider. Violet finds that she’s more equal to the task than she thought, and starts a relationship with a third year cadet named Xaden who seems to have good reason not to like her.

The Fourth Wing show is being developed at Prime Video, and is one of several big fantasy shows on the way that want to fill the void left by the phenomenally popular Game of Thrones. There’s no release date yet.

Credit: Doubleday

Apple TV has picked up the rights to Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy, which consists of Harlem Shuffle (2021), Crook Manifesto (2023), and Cool Machine (2026). The books follow Ray Carney, a furniture salesman who comes from a criminal family and who can’t quite resist dipping his toe back into those waters over the years. The first book is set in New York City in the 1950s, and the series follows him all the way through the ’80s.

Whitehead is an talented, incisive author who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Apple is going for literary heft in adapting these books, and showing a commitment to scale that rivals other Apple TV series like Pachinko or For All Mankind. It’s great to see a streaming service take a big swing like this.

This adaptation is still early in development, so there’s no release date yet.

Credit: Minotaur

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It is a comic novel about a struggling writer and mother of two who gets mistaken for an assassin. Soon enough, she needs to disentangle herself from a web of lies and crime. Naturally, Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock alum Tina Fey has signed up to adapt the book to TV for Peacock.

Author Elle Cosimano has already written five more books in this series, with a sixth on the way. There’s no cast or release date announced for this show yet, but it’s nice to know there’s at least one comedy literary adaptation on the way.

Credit: Drmaster Pubns Inc

In the west, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is best known as an Oscar-winning 2000 martial arts movie directed by Ang Lee. It’s actually based on the fourth entry in Wang Dulu’s Crane-Iron Series, and was originally serialized between 1941 and 1942.

Now, Prime Video will adapt the story anew, with new actors playing star-crossed warriors Shu Lien and Mu Bai. We don’t know who those actors are yet, nor do we have a release date, but we know that Jason Ning (Lucifer) and Ron Moore (Outlander, For All Mankind) are on board as producers.

Credit: Tor Books

Brandon Sanderson is one of the biggest fantasy authors working today, and thanks to Apple, his work is finally making the jump to the screen. His biggest series, The Stormlight Archive, will be a TV show.

The Stormlight Archive is a sprawling story set on the planet of Roshar, which is regularly battered by magical super-storms. We follow a wide collection of characters as they try to prevent an apocalyptic event.

Apple is also adapting Sanderson’s Mistborn books as a series of movies, although we don’t have release dates for either yet.