Apple TV Just Lit the Fuse on TV’s Next Sci-Fi Juggernaut: Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere

If you’re into sci-fi TV—especially the big, expensive-looking stuff—Apple TV+ might be the current king of the genre. They’ve been dropping hit after hit: For All Mankind nails the high-stakes space race, Silo pulls in a stacked cast for its grim, underground future, and Foundation is finally giving Isaac Asimov fans the sprawling adaptation they've wanted. Toss in Severance and Pluribus (both of which are probably the weirdest things to hit sci-fi in years), and it’s clear: Apple is throwing money and brains at science fiction like nobody’s business.

So, when news broke that Apple landed the rights to Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe, it made a whole lot of sense. Sanderson might be branded as a fantasy author, but his stuff has always felt different—like a fantasy series that secretly wishes it was hard sci-fi.

The Cosmere: Not Your Standard Fantasy World

If you’ve ever picked up anything by Sanderson—say, Mistborn or The Stormlight Archive—you get the idea: These are sprawling, magical worlds, often medieval on the surface, but the way magic works isn’t pure hand-waving. Compared to Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings, the Cosmere feels almost clinical about its magic systems. Fights aren’t just ‘shoot fireballs and hope for the best’—they’re the kind of battles where knowing the chemistry and the physics behind the powers actually matters.

'In a way, most magic in his books is akin to the One Ring, while my magic tends to be an unexplored science that--if understood--can indeed be used reliably. Strangely, in this, he’s more (J.R.R.) Tolkien, and I’m more (Isaac) Asimov.'
– Brandon Sanderson, explaining his approach

That’s not just marketing; Sanderson’s got the science chops for this, too. He started off in college as a biochemistry major before he switched lanes to writing. You can actually see that logical thinking baked into his stories—especially as his YA books (Skyward) and upcoming fantasy/sci-fi mashups (The Sunlit Man, the future Mistborn entries) drift even further from castles-and-dragons territory into straight-up spaceships and technology.

Apple’s Grand Plan: Not Just Another Fantasy Series

Here’s what’s wild: Apple didn’t greenlight the Cosmere just to churn out some fairy-tale knockoffs. It’s thinking much, much bigger. The idea is to treat Sanderson’s interconnected book universe as a proper cinematic epic—a timeline that starts out with magical swords and sorcery but eventually morphs into interstellar battles and world-hopping.

The thing that makes Cosmere stand out from other massive franchises (Star Wars, Star Trek, you name it) is that this isn’t a single-setting space adventure. You basically start in Tolkien country, and by the end, everyone’s got access to advanced science and galaxies are in play. Sanderson has said he thinks of the Cosmere like a ‘dwarf galaxy’—a bunch of worlds linked together, with long-term storylines all heading for a crossover cosmic finale.

What's Actually in the Pipeline?

• Mistborn: The caper-heavy fantasy series is already planned as a feature film.
• Future Cosmere Installments: Upcoming novels will go full sci-fi, backing up the whole ‘universe evolves over time’ concept.
• Apple's Ambition: All this is apparently just the start—they’re not just making a Mistborn movie. They want a cinematic universe with the variety (and probably the budgets) to rival anything else on TV or in theaters.

Bottom line: Cosmere could be the most ambitious thing Apple TV has tried. The scale alone is ridiculous—shifting aesthetics, a timeline that covers entire epochs of world-building, crossover events that are built into the DNA of the books, not just shoehorned in after the fact. The only trick here: Apple has to actually pull it off. Do right by Sanderson’s novels, and the next decade of sci-fi TV could look very different.