The Well We Never Tapped

Disclosure: This reflects my personal experience and interpretation of publicly available information. It represents my views alone—not any employer or organization—and is not professional advice.

A Decade Later

In December 2015, I wrote a piece for ZDNet arguing that the future of science fiction would be in the clouds. The streaming revolution was just beginning to scale. Amazon had proven with The Man in the High Castle that complex, cerebral literary sci-fi could find an audience outside of Hollywood’s risk-averse studio system. I argued that there was a tremendous well of untapped material—six decades of Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels that had never been adapted—and that subscription platforms would be the infrastructure that finally unlocked it.

I named names. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. Haldeman’s The Forever War. Moorcock’s Elric. Properties trapped in development hell for years, too complex for film, too risky for broadcast, too adult for mainstream Hollywood. The argument was that streaming would break the bottleneck.

A decade later, I’m writing the sequel.

The platforms arrived. The infrastructure scaled. And the industry used it to produce more Star Trek, more Star Wars, more Marvel. The well I identified is still untapped. The properties I named are still in development hell or simply forgotten. The only thing that has changed is that the franchises themselves are now also failing.

I originally set out to write about the existential crisis facing Star Trek and Star Wars—about franchise fatigue, about why neither mythology is landing with audiences, about the structural failures of Starfleet Academy and the post-Skywalker void. But the further I got into it, the clearer it became that franchise fatigue and mythological exhaustion are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is older and more damning: science fiction didn’t run out of ideas. The industry refused to use them.

Patient Zero

Star Trek and Star Wars are not the subject of this essay. They are the diagnostic evidence—the first patients to present symptoms of an industry-wide disease. Start with the blood work.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy didn’t stick. But then, Discovery never really stuck either—it was controversial from premiere to finale. The only Trek series that found genuine footing in the streaming era was Strange New Worlds, and it did so by retreating to the safest possible ground: episodic structure, TOS-era setting, familiar characters, optimistic tone. The franchise’s one unqualified success in a decade was a deliberate step backward. That tells you everything about the trap: every time Trek tries something new, it struggles, and every time it retreats to something familiar, it succeeds, which teaches the institution exactly the wrong lesson.

Picard told the same story in miniature. Its first two seasons were divisive; its third succeeded by abandoning any pretense of being a new show and delivering a full TNG cast reunion. The audience responded—and the season naturally set up the next evolution, with Jeri Ryan as captain of the Enterprise-G. Fan demand for Star Trek: Legacy has been loud and sustained. The franchise almost certainly won’t make it. The institution can’t commit to the obvious next step, even when the audience is explicitly asking for it—simultaneously too afraid to try something new and too afraid to follow through on what just worked.

Now Strange New Worlds is heading toward its conclusion, and Star Trek doesn’t have a clear flagship series to replace it. The usual debate has followed—too “woke,” too modern—but that explanation is lazy. Star Trek has always been progressive. If “wokeness” were the problem, the franchise would have failed in the 1960s.

The real issue is structural. Academy failed not on premise but on execution—it tried to be a coming-of-age story, an institutional drama, a serialized mystery, an episodic moral framework, and a legacy extension all at once, and committed to none of them. Without a clear narrative spine, the series never established what it actually was.

Ironically, the show proved it had the talent to work—twice. The Doctor’s story of personal loss and Jay-Den’s flashback revealing the emotional architecture behind his choices were the two strongest episodes of the season because they stopped juggling and committed to a single throughline. The talent was there. The material was there. What was missing was priority.

This pattern isn’t new. Enterprise was the first Trek series canceled prematurely, back in 2005—the original evidence that continuous production could exhaust the audience. The industry’s response was a 12-year television hiatus, and it worked. It rebuilt demand. Discovery launched in 2017 to genuine anticipation. Then the franchise immediately squandered the goodwill by flooding the market with six concurrent series, burning through audience patience faster than ever.

The Kelvin Timeline films with the new TOS cast told the same story from the other direction. They succeeded creatively but were placed in a compartmentalized alternate timeline that explicitly avoided altering the main continuity. The films were allowed to exist—but not to matter.

Hedging, compartmentalization, the refusal to let any single creative bet define the franchise going forward—Star Trek keeps building rooms it won’t move into. Mythology survives because it’s flexible enough to be retold. Greek tragedians retold the same stories for different eras. Black Mirror reinterprets The Twilight Zone. But Star Trek has been stuck in between—trying to evolve while preserving itself in amber. And that tension is now breaking it.

The Exhaustion—And the Treatment That Failed

I don’t need to belabor this point. The franchise fatigue diagnosis is by now one of the most well-worn observations in entertainment criticism. Star Wars can’t find a post-Skywalker identity. Marvel flooded the market until the audience stopped caring. DC keeps rebooting. House of the Dragon lost twenty-two percent of its audience between seasons despite being built on the most valuable fantasy IP in television. Alien: Earth earned strong reviews but a divided audience, and its long-term survival on a Disney platform, with its content strategy tightening, is an open question. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms worked precisely because it was compartmentalized—a limited story free to be good and end. The lesson is right there. The industry keeps ignoring it.

Mythology needs fallow periods the way soil needs rotation. You can’t harvest the same field every season and expect the yield to remain the same. But the franchise fatigue argument, as commonly made, stops at the diagnosis. It says the patient is exhausted. It doesn’t ask why the treatment isn’t working.

A decade ago, I believed streaming was the treatment. I was wrong—or at least, I was only half right. The infrastructure arrived exactly as predicted. The technical capacity to produce and distribute ambitious, complex adult science fiction at scale became a reality. What didn’t change was the institutional appetite for risk. Instead of using the new distribution model to unlock the vast catalog of unadapted literary science fiction, the platforms replicated the franchise dependency pattern they were supposed to disrupt. Paramount built Paramount+ around Star Trek. Disney built Disney+ around Star Wars and Marvel. Netflix licensed franchise IP wherever it could. The pipes were new. The product was the same.

The six decades of Hugo and Nebula winners I identified in 2015 are still sitting on the shelf. Stranger in a Strange Land is still unadapted. Rendezvous with Rama is still in development limbo. The Forever War is still languishing. The bottleneck didn’t break. It moved upstream.

Amazon’s trajectory tells the whole story. They started by tapping the well—Man in the High Castle was a Philip K. Dick adaptation that proved the concept. They rescued The Expanse, a critically acclaimed literary adaptation that Syfy couldn’t sustain, only to cancel it themselves after three more seasons, with three novels still unadapted because the numbers didn’t justify the cost. And then they pivoted entirely, spending four hundred and sixty-five million dollars on the first season of The Rings of Power, which roughly two-thirds of viewers who started didn’t finish. They canceled Wheel of Time as costs rose and viewership fell. Amazon went from unlocking literary sci-fi to chasing franchise-scale in real time, trading the model that worked for one that promised bigger numbers but delivered diminishing returns.

Even the streaming era’s most celebrated sci-fi successes—Fallout on Amazon, The Last of Us on HBO—are video game franchise adaptations, pre-existing IP with built-in audiences. They’re good television. They’re also franchise retrenchment from a different source medium. The institutional instinct hasn’t changed. Just the shelf it shops from.

There is one exception, and it’s an indictment of everyone else.

Apple TV+ has done exactly what I argued streaming could do—and then gone further. Foundation, Silo, Murderbot, For All Mankind, Severance, Pluribus. Concept-first, writer-driven, often uncomfortable science fiction with no obligation to pre-existing mythology. Pluribus ended up at Apple after a bidding war—not because Apple offered the most money, but because they promised Vince Gilligan what he called “the gift of trust and time.” That phrase should haunt every other studio executive in the industry. Trust and time are precisely what franchise-dependent platforms cannot offer, because they need every show to justify the subscription on arrival.

But Apple can do this because content isn’t their business model—hardware and services are. Apple is playing with house money. Everyone else is playing with rent money. The proof of concept exists, but the only company that can execute it is the one wealthy enough not to care about the outcome. The infrastructure didn’t fail. The decision-making did.

Two Mythologies, One Crisis

But the parallel crisis of Star Trek and Star Wars isn’t just an industry story. It’s a cultural one.

These aren’t two franchises that happen to be struggling at the same time. They are the two poles of American science fiction mythology—and they’re both failing simultaneously, during one of the most fractured periods in modern American life. That is not a coincidence. It’s a diagnosis.

Star Trek is aspirational. It has always shown us what we could become if our institutions worked—if reason prevailed, if cooperation was possible, if diversity was a source of strength rather than friction. It is the mythology of the functioning system.

Star Wars is insurgent. It has always told us that systems corrupt—that empires are inevitable, that liberation comes from individual courage, and that resistance is a spiritual act, not an institutional one.

One is utopian. The other is revolutionary. And together, they’ve mapped the boundaries of how Americans imagine the relationship between power, justice, and the future.

Right now, neither framework is landing. And the reason goes deeper than execution.

Star Trek was built for Cold War America—a country that, despite everything, still believed its institutions could work, and that cooperation across difference was the path forward. Star Wars was built for post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America—a country that had just watched its institutions betray it and needed a mythology about fighting back from the margins. Both frameworks made sense in their moments. Neither was designed to address a culture in which institutional legitimacy and insurgent identity are simultaneously in crisis, in which the audience is fragmented not just politically but epistemologically—where people can’t even agree on what’s real, let alone what’s just.

I’ve been tracking this gap for years. In a separate piece, I argued that Star Trek’s technology predictions had been remarkably fulfilled—communicators became smartphones, PADDs became tablets, natural language interfaces became Siri and Alexa—but that Roddenberry’s social vision had not. The post-scarcity egalitarianism, the post-nationalism, the principled institutions—none of that arrived. The gadgets were easy. The civilization was hard. And Star Wars can’t find a post-Skywalker identity because the rebel-versus-empire binary buckles when the audience can’t agree on who the empire is. Everyone believes they’re the resistance. Nobody agrees on what they’re resisting.

The industry’s response has been to keep retrofitting these frameworks to the present—adding modern language, contemporary casting, updated aesthetics—while leaving the underlying moral architecture unchanged. But the architecture is the problem. You cannot make Star Trek’s institutional optimism feel authentic by making the bridge crew more diverse. Diversity was never the issue. The issue is that the audience no longer trusts the institution the bridge crew serves. You cannot make Star Wars’s insurgent mythology feel urgent by changing who holds the lightsaber. The lightsaber was never the issue. The issue is that the moral binary it represents no longer maps onto how the audience experiences power.

And here is the part that should embarrass the industry into action: the literary science fiction sitting in that untapped well wasn’t written to address the cultural moments of 1966 or 1977. Much of it was written to address the world we are living in right now—surveillance capitalism, ecological collapse, post-national identity, artificial intelligence, the ethics of genetic modification, and the psychology of digital existence. Octavia Butler wrote about authoritarian populism and biological adaptation decades before either became daily news. William Gibson mapped corporate-controlled digital reality before the internet existed—and it took forty-one years and Apple’s house money to finally get Neuromancer into production, while Star Trek got six concurrent series in half that time.

These aren’t hypothetical themes. They’re Tuesday. And novels are sitting on shelves that engage them with more sophistication than any franchise retrofit ever could.

The problem isn’t that science fiction has nothing to say to this moment. The problem is that the industry keeps forcing this moment’s questions through narrative frameworks that were built to answer different ones.

The Merger Question

Which brings us to what happens next.

Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery—expected to close in the third quarter of 2026—will create the largest consolidation of science fiction and fantasy intellectual property in entertainment history. Star Trek and DC will share a corporate roof. HBO’s content library will sit alongside Paramount’s. The combined entity has promised thirty theatrical films per year across both studios. Whether any of those slots go to ambitious literary adaptations or all thirty become franchise sequels will determine whether the industry has learned anything at all.

The merger will be a test. Not of whether these companies can produce more content—they clearly can—but of whether consolidation produces creative discipline or just amplifies the existing addiction to safe bets.

And there is reason for concern. We already know what Warner Bros. Discovery does to original science fiction when the spreadsheets get tight. Raised by Wolves—Ridley Scott’s critically acclaimed original sci-fi series, built from scratch with no franchise pedigree—was canceled after two seasons during the previous Warner merger. And then the company didn’t just cancel it. They removed it from the platform entirely, scrubbing it from HBO Max as a cost-cutting measure. A Ridley Scott science-fiction series, erased. That is the corporate entity that is about to take custody of Star Trek.

And the other side of the deal offers no more comfort. Amazon spent eight and a half billion dollars acquiring MGM—over four thousand films, seventeen thousand TV episodes, a century of intellectual property—and its biggest science fiction bet since has been pouring nearly half a billion into the first season of Rings of Power while letting The Expanse die incomplete and canceling Wheel of Time. They bought an entire studio’s catalog and used it to chase franchise scale rather than fund the kind of original literary adaptations that built their reputation in the first place.

And what’s next from the MGM acquisition? Stargate and James Bond. Stargate—effectively the third sci-fi franchise after Trek and Wars- already stretched across four series. Bond—twenty-seven films deep. Meanwhile, that same catalog contains properties like Logan’s Run—a single 1976 film based on a novel with unadapted sequels, built around a premise about state-mandated death that’s arguably more relevant now than it was fifty years ago. Nobody’s looking at it. It’s not franchise-scale. This isn’t tapping the well. This is reaching into one drawer of the filing cabinet while ignoring every other.

The question isn’t just whether the merged Paramount-Warner company will invest in original material. It’s whether any of these consolidating entities will. The pattern is consistent: acquire more IP, promise more content, produce less originality. Every merger makes the library bigger and the ambition smaller.

The Boldest Move Is No Move

What Star Trek needs now isn’t another experiment. What Star Wars needs isn’t another recalibration. What the industry needs isn’t another franchise extension placed in the hope that this time the center will hold.

What all of them need is to stop.

Not permanently. Not as an admission of failure. But as an act of discipline, the kind the industry has refused to exercise for nearly a decade of continuous franchise production.

Give them ten years. Enterprise already proved this works—the twelve-year hiatus after its cancellation rebuilt the demand that Discovery launched into. Let absence do what continuous production cannot. Let a generation of viewers grow up without Star Trek and Star Wars being ambient noise and discover them as something worth seeking out. Let the culture change enough that when these mythologies return, they have something new to say—not because the writers are straining for relevance, but because the world has moved and the stories can meet it somewhere genuinely unfamiliar.

Use the breathing room to finally reach into that well of unadapted science fiction. Give Heinlein, Clarke, Haldeman, and Moorcock their shot. Give the next generation of sci-fi writers—the ones who have been self-publishing and direct-distributing because the legacy system has no room for them—a development budget and a platform. Build something genuinely new instead of strip-mining the same five intellectual properties into dust.

When Star Trek does come back—and it will—Strange New Worlds has already proven the path: a direct evolution into a reinterpreted TOS era, not a reboot, not another compartmentalized hedge. But that’s the long-term play. And the long term requires something the industry hasn’t been willing to do.

Nothing.

The well is still there. Six decades deep and growing. Full of stories that were written for the world we actually live in—not the one we lived in when Kirk first sat in that chair or Luke first picked up that lightsaber.

The futures we haven’t seen yet are the ones this moment needs. Science fiction didn’t run out of ideas. The industry just refused to use them.