The television show “Game of Thrones” will air its final episode in 2018, and some hardcore fans of author George R.R. Martin are already in mourning.

But there's good news: A television series based on “Wild Cards,” the anthology and novel series edited by Martin that launched in 1986, is in the works, and could hit the small screen in the next two years.

“?‘Wild Cards' is a series of books, graphic novels, games … but most of all it is a universe,” Martin explained on his blog, “as large and diverse and exciting as the comic book universes of Marvel and DC (though somewhat grittier, and considerably more realistic and more consistent), with an enormous cast of characters both major and minor.”

“Wild Cards” is set in an alternate-history version of the United States in which an alien virus hits Manhattan in 1946 and spreads across the world.

“Of those infected, 90 percent died horribly, drawing the black queen,” Martin writes. “9 percent were twisted and deformed into jokers, while a lucky 1 percent became blessed with extraordinary and unpredictable powers and became aces. The world was never the same.”

The television series will be produced by Universal Cable Productions, which is owned by NBC Universal. “Of course, Hollywood is Hollywood, and nothing is ever certain in development,” Martin wrote, “but I think I hope I cross my fingers that the ‘Wild Cards' will be coming to your home screens in the next year or two.”

Martin wrote that he won't be involved in the show, as he has an exclusive development deal with HBO, the network that airs “Game of Thrones.”

— Los Angeles Times