If they don’t immediately seem like the people to bring these revered books to screens, they’re certainly saying all the right things. Indeed, the majority of its content at the moment seems to revolve around showing MMA matches and making reality television about tattoo artists. This is the channel whose first foray into scripted television in a decade only happened last year with the not-exactly-setting-the-world-alight miniseries Tut, based on the life of Tutankhamun. Where epic television has become synonymous with the BBC and premium cable channels such as HBO and Showtime, Red Mars is being produced by and aired on Spike TV.

Perhaps the only question mark comes with the channel that’s making the show.

Straczynski may have the perfect skill set to run a complicated project such as Red Marsand will be joined on by Game of Thrones producer Vince Gerardis – another great name to have on board.

He wasn’t at all wrong – really, TV could not be in safer hands.Īre the books in safe hands? The man in charge of adapting Robinson’s space opera is no stranger to epic sci-fi himself: in the 1990s, J Michael Straczynski created the much-loved Babylon 5, a story of battles and moral quandaries concerning our push to populate space with plenty of conspiracies and twists. Indeed, it’ll be interesting to see if the screenwriters – with Kim Stanley Robinson confirmed as a consultant – will update his allegories to take in global warming, fracking and the other fears that have arrived since the books’ publication.Įarlier this year, science fiction author Adam Roberts described Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel Aurora as “the best generation starship novel I’ve ever read”. Dealing mostly with the people chosen to terraform the planet, their lives and the metaphorical baggage that they bring to this most hostile and dangerous of jobs, the books have a wonderful underlying allegory about our own planet. Robinson tells a story of discovery, seen up close through his characters’ eyes, and taking place over several centuries. Unlike Game of Thrones, however, the books are less about war and more about peace. Robinson’s trilogy comes with the kind of twists, lies and larger overarching mysteries that dominate TV drama, playing themselves out on the surface of the hitherto unexplored planet.

Mars trilogy by kim stanley robinson