George R. R. Martin is busy to put it lightly. He's working on an adaptation of his mentor's novel for HBO, a brand new video-game from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware, and now, his own novelette Sandkings is being adapted by Netflix.

This adaptation comes from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski and Utopia creator Dennis Kelly. The novelette pre-dates Martin's work on the likes of Game of Thrones - of which the finale is still in the works - coming from 1979.

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"One of the screenplays is based on a George R.R. Martin short story called Sandkings, which is this brilliant little twisted short story that I love," Verbinski told Collider, "And I'm working with a great writer, Dennis Kelly, who wrote the original [Utopia]... The British original series is brilliant. And Dennis is doing the adaptation, so I'm kind of excited about that."

It is also being produced by John Baldecchi who produced a prior work of Verbinski, that of the 2001 feature The Mexican.

Sandkings is a success story for Martin, having won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1980 and the Nebula Award for the same category. It was also nominated for the Balrog Award in short fiction. As such, it's no surprise that it's getting brought into live-action by one of the bigger streaming services of whom are capitalising on plenty of fan-favorite stories and cult classics at the moment.

Sandkings already got itself an adaptation in 1995 which currently sits at a 7.4/10 on IMDb. The story itself is about Simon Kress, a wealthy playboy on the planet Baldur - no, not Baldur's Gate - and he is an avid collector of exotic animals. His pets die after a lengthy business trip which is a touch bleak and morbid, but when he returns, he dives into the city to find more. There, he finds a shop called Wo & Shade who are selling sandkings.

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