Tor reports that Legendary TV has optioned the rights for John Scalzi‘s latest novel Lock In. Scalzi is on fire these days. This marks the third of his novels being developed for the small screen, with his Old Man’s War series being developed by Syfy and FX working on a television series based on his 2012 novel, Redshirts.

Lock In takes place in a not-too-distant future where the world is recovering from a global epidemic. The lingering effects of the disease has left a small percentage of the population with a condition called Hayden’s Syndrome or Lock In, where they are fully awake and aware, but unable to control their bodies or speak. In response to this tragedy, technological advances develop with the sole purpose of giving back Lock Ins some semblance of their lives by allowing their conscious minds to take possession of robotic avatars and in some cases rare individuals called integrators whose brain chemistry was altered by the disease to allow Lock Ins to ride along and temporarily control them for a price. The story follows Chris Shane, a FBI agent and Lock In, who is trying to solve a murder in the midst of a tense social upheaval as the U.S. has decided to pull support from the Hayden research.

Source [Tor]