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Spike TV Is Turning Red Mars Into a TV Series (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Kim Stanley Robinson's popular trilogy Red/Green/Blue Mars is going to see its first book turn into a TV series produced by Spike TV and is slated for release in 2017. The episodes will be an hour long, and their writing will be led by J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon-5. According to Variety, "the series will follow the first settlers charged with terraforming a mysterious planet, all of whom have competed to be a part of the mission."
I didn't find them slow at all. However, I would have loved to see real 2nd and 3rd generation characters, rather than inventing life-extension and keeping the same old group around.
The books spent a lot of time on the science and on characters' personal motivations. By its very nature, a television (or movie) script will elide most of that, or at most allude to it, and automatically become more concise.
When there wasn't a massive space battle, Babylon 5 was basically a soap opera. In honor of this fact, they even hired several former soap opera actors. The Mars trilogy can be written much the same way.
On the other hand, part of the feeling inherent to the books involves the emptiness of the planet, and they're probably going to have to have some long shots and long silences to convey that. It's questionable whether modern audiences will sit still for it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"