

Screen and television rights were purchased by Vista in 1984, which produced a 1987 film adaptation with a screenplay co-written by Martin, with writer/producer Robert Jaffe. Nightflyers is set in the same fictional "Thousand Worlds" universe as several of Martin's other works, including Dying of the Light, Sandkings, A Song for Lya, " The Way of Cross and Dragon", " With Morning Comes Mistfall", and the stories collected in Tuf Voyaging. In the extended version, Martin supplied additional backstory on several characters, and named secondary characters which were not named in the original version.

In 1981, at the request of his editor at the time, James Frenkel, Martin expanded the story into a 30,000-word piece, which was published by Dell Publishing, together with Vernor Vinge's True Names, as part of their Binary Star series. Originally written in 1980, the 23,000-word novella was published by Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The film is based on a novella that appears in George R. Catherine Mary Stewart as Miranda Dorlac.The film is about a group of scientists who begin a space voyage to find a mysterious alien being, and in the process are victimized by the ship's malevolent computer. Nightflyers is a 1987 American science fiction horror film based on Nightflyers, a 1980 novella by George R.
