Actor Joseph Fiennes and Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer on location in Los Angeles shooting Flash Forward. (Carolyn Clink)

A novel by Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer is to be developed into an ABC network series along the lines of Lost.

ABC has ordered 13 episodes of Flash Forward and it is expected to debut this fall on the U.S. network.

It is based on Sawyer's 1999 book Flashforward, in which a mysterious event occurs that causes many people on earth to have visions of the future.

Sawyer, who lives in Mississauga, Ont., is an internationally acclaimed science fiction writer of books such as Hominids, Golden Fleece, Relativity and Wake.

People in Flash Forward have visions of deaths, relationships gone wrong and other significant events six months in the future, but as their lives unfold, it appears there are ways to circumvent what might otherwise seem to be predestined.

ABC is capitalizing on the mystery factor in the series, with a five-second commercials on the current season of Lost that flash an image and ask: "What did you see?"

"You're following a bunch of individuals in the first two minutes," ABC's executive vice-president of drama development, Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs, said in describing the series.

"Our FBI agent, played by Joseph Fiennes, appears to be in an FBI chase. You think he has a car crash. He has a flash of all sorts of things and he wakes up on the freeway and subsequently discovers that everybody else in the world has had a blackout that lasted the same amount of time. This resulted in a lot of devastation across the world," she added.

"Everybody talks about their flash and they realize they were all dreaming of the same day — which is a day in the future. You can identify with the different people and have that sense of global import — we're all in it together — like Lost."

The series was developed at HBO, which later decided it was more suited for network TV. ABC and Fox engaged in heated bidding to take it on.

The series stars Fiennes, Sonya Walger, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Brian O'Byrne, Courtney B. Vance, Christine Woods, Zachary Knighton and Peyton List. It was created by David Goyer, one of the writers on The Dark Night and Brannon Braga, a writer-producer on 24 and Enterprise.