Kim Stanley Robinson’s landmark Mars trilogy will soon terraform your TV
We just finished rescuing Matt Damon from Mars and we’re already looking forward to our return trip: following a year of rumors, Spike TV has given a straight-to-series greenlight to the long-simmering adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson’s bestselling, award-laden Mars trilogy.
A 10-episode season of Red Mars is projected to air in January 2017. This is fantastic news, and signals that the current small screen sci-fi renaissance won’t be short-lived.
Robinson’s trilogy has been eyed for adaptation for ages, and with the buzz around major SF/F adaptations like James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, and Terry Brooks’ Shannara series louder than ever, Spike appears to be striking while the iron is hot: picking up a critically acclaimed novel series that will yield a complicated, engaging television show.
Even more exciting: Red Mars will be written and run by J. Michael Straczynski, best known for Babylon 5 and recently one of the co-creators of the Wachowski’s Netflix SF series Sense8. Babylon 5 has long been described as a novel for television with a tight story arc, and it even stopped off at the Red Planet a time or two. We can’t think of a better person to shepherd Robinson’s books to series.
The books certainly provide a good base for prestige television. They has everything you could want from this sort of thing: a complex plot with plenty of interesting characters and ample opportunity for eye candy. Red Mars begins in 2026 as a colonial ship embarks for the planet with a crew of a hundred colonists.
The mission is designed to establish a human colony there, and the book explores the hardships of life on an inhospitable world alongside tensions between the characters, their attitudes towards terraforming Mars for human life, and the budding relationship between the Martians and their new home planet.
The show appears to be based on the entire trilogy, which includes Green Mars and Blue Mars, giving the showrunners plenty of options; there’s enough material in the first book that it’s entirely possible they’ll be able to spend more than a season just on Red Mars.
Green Mars takes place 50 years later, and picks up the lives of the remaining colonists and their descendants. Blue Mars is set even further in the future, when the Mars atmosphere has developed enough that oceans have appeared. Should the show last into later seasons, there’s room for the show to move beyond the focus on Mars to focus on humanity’s next steps as a species.
Robinson’s fiction is shot through with realistic optimism: his books about interstellar travel dispense with common tropes like hyperdrives and gravity devices. Recently, he’s written about the difficulty of living anywhere aside from our own planet, and his books Aurora and 2312 have detailed how important Earth is for sustaining human life.
A Red Mars series will provide a nice counterpoint to The Martian, even as the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s book has drummed up fresh interest in Mars as both a setting for fiction and an outpost for real scientific discoveries. This won’t be a hard-science thriller like The Martian—Red Mars and its sequels are rich, complicated books that examine politics and sociology as much as nuts-and-bolts science.
The only bad news at this point is the wait. According to Variety, Red Mars is slated to begin production next summer for release in January 2017.