Finally, we have some good news for the end of the week. According to Variety, Amazon is going on a bit of a sci-fi binge. The streaming network, which has already given us delights like The Man in the High Castle and an excellent new version of The Tick, has commissioned three new series: the Larry Niven classic Ringworld, Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk Snow Crash, and (the one that brightened my day most) Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark.

Assuming all three remain true to their source material, each will be a very different vision of the future. Ringworld takes place nearly a thousand years from now in a post-scarcity culture. Written in 1970 and the first of a long-running series of books, the titular Ringworld is a vast habitat in space.

In Ringworld, our hero is a bored 200-year old hired by some aliens to investigate this artificial world—a 600 million-mile (950 million km) ribbon orbiting a Sun-like star. It's been awhile since I've read the book but it's easy to see how previous attempts to adapt it for the screen have ended in failure. But with an Amazonian budget and and ever-more capable CGI, now might be the perfect time to try.

Snow Crash will be a one-hour drama. A product of the early 1990s, it's set in a failed state that used to be America, where the corporations run everything. It too has a vast artificial location, but this time it's the Metaverse, Stephenson's extrapolation of a VR-enabled Internet. Hiro Protagonist—an on-the-nose name if ever there was—is a hacker and pizza delivery driver for the Mafia who comes into possession of dangerous file, Snow Crash, which sends him on a rabbit chase.

Thus far the second wave of VR has failed to spawn an early-1990s revival, but if anything will motivate the younger crowd to start buying old copies of Mondo 2000 on eBay, this could be the show to do it. Paramount Television is co-producing the show, and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) and Frank Marshall (Back to the Future) are attached as executive producers.

Finally, there's Lazarus. This one is a comic, not a novel, and it's much more current; the first issue was published in 2013. It's set several decades from now, long after a breakdown in the global order brought an end to the nation-state and climate change and biological warfare killed hundreds of millions. The Carlyles are one of the sixteen families that now control the world with absolute power in their territories. Those who have skills valuable to them are elevated to the level of serfs, everyone else is just waste. Disputes are settled in single combat, each family represented by a Lazarus—an enhanced warrior. The story follows the Carlyle Lazarus, Forever.

I’m going to abuse my privilege and tell you that if Lazarus isn’t already on your reading list it should be, for it is one of the very best things in comics right now. However, be warned that the world created by Rucka (who writes), Lark (who draws), and collaborator Eric Trautmann feels just a little too close to home right now. It’s a view that the creators can’t escape, Rucka tells Ars:

Michael Lark is fond of saying that, when we started Lazarus, we were telling a science fiction story—albeit a near-future and somewhat hard-science one—and now we’re pretty much telling a documentary. I used to be able to laugh it off, but developments around the world in the last year have made it harder for me to do so.

Rucka and Lark will be executive producers, and the former is also going to write the show. Talking to Rucka, I was particularly curious what it meant to bring this world he’s created to a new audience unfamiliar with the comic.

The opportunity to share—and honestly, to really get to drill down and expand—the world we’ve created and the stories we’re telling (and, even better, the stories that we haven’t been able to tell due to the space and time constraints in comics) is incredibly exciting. I know that sounds horribly cliché, but it’s absolutely genuine. There’s just so much that Michael and I have never been able to show, things that Eric has designed that we’ve never been able to share, and to get the opportunity to put that on the Amazon stage is thrilling as hell. That Amazon has been, from the very first conversations, absolutely crystal clear that they want what we’ve built, that they’re not looking to dilute or change that, is the best endorsement we could hope for, and has all of us chomping at the bit to get to work.

Beyond these three series, Variety also reports that Amazon studio boss Roy Price told employees he’s “bullish” about 2018 and 2019. For now, Amazon's plan to keep investing in quality content to meet customer demand will continue.

Listing image by Image Comics