Netflix's [now canceled] TV series Sense 8 hails from film creator siblings known as The Wachowskis and follows a group of 8 characters across the globe whom become psychically linked, as they learn they are apart of what is called "a cluster" and later learn that they may also be super human or another kind of human.
The story of Sense8 begins when the psychic connection of eight strangers from different cultures and parts of the world is "birthed" by a woman called Angelica, who kills herself to avoid capture by a man named "Whispers". The eight eventually discover they now form a cluster of "sensates": human beings who are mentally and emotionally linked, can sense and communicate with each other, and can share their knowledge, language, and skills.
The story format and and certain story elements are similar to a film they worked on previously, called Cloud Atlas, which was adapted from the novelist David Mitchell's book of the same name. Anyone who has read Mitchell's work also knows that, much like Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, all of Mitchell's works exist in the same universe as revealed in a later novel The Bone Clocks. Much like Sense 8, The Bone Clocks features similar ideas about reincarnation and a hidden super race living alongside humans, whom are engulfed in war.
The novel is divided into six sections with five point-of-view first-person narrators. They are loosely connected by the character of Holly Sykes, a young woman from Gravesend who is gifted with an "invisible eye" and semi-psychic abilities, and a war between two immortal factions, the Anchorites, who derive their immortality from murdering others, and the Horologists, who are naturally able to reincarnate.
The title refers to a pejorative term that the immortal characters of the book use to refer to normal humans, who are doomed to mortality because of their aging bodies.
With such similarities I was wondering if David Mitchell's works are a big influence on the Sense 8 TV series. Was he involved at all?
