Oh please let it happen please. My high school self is bouncing with tears of joy pleeease.
Here is the part of my day where I squee!
And here is the part where I realize they’re going to try and do it on the cheap and we end up with Atlas Shrugged.
Whoa, very cool. If this gets made, I wonder how they will handle the aging. I mean, by the end some of the characters are, what, over 200 years old?
A year ago, somone posted this fan draft for a first episode on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/12auuw/during_the_hurricane_my_friend_and_i_are/
This could be excellent.
I’ve read the trilogy several times, never dreaming that it would end up on TV. They’d better do a good- no, outstanding- job of it.
I’m so glad that this is looking like a TV deal, not a film deal. Long, sprawling novels with so many characters and overlapping narratives deserve the room to breathe that seasons of TV can afford.
I think that generally a film can cover a short story and that’s about it.
I have bad memories of the TV adaptation of the Martian Chronicles. I hope the money isn’t spread too thin in this one. And seriously, it won’t have the depth of the story. Best of luck to the producers but I am not holding my breath.
Atlas Shrugged would be horrible no matter how much money you threw at it. You cannot make a silk purse from a pig’s ear.
IMO it actually bodes kinda well for our chances of colonising Mars… can’t hurt.
I’m reminded of Celestia, and the time I DLed the Green Mars textures.
I think the correct phrase is, “You can’t make a silk purse from a steaming pile of reactionary, libertarian shite.” 
Aging? Simple. They’ll do what they always do:
Time Compression.
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At the start, everyone is aged 25-35.
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Maximum speed of time passing is 1 year per season, plus 1 year in between. Political developments are more fun when they happen more rapidly. Watching terraforming happen in real time is booooring. And how many viewers will really notice that going to Earh and back again within a single episode is “unrealistic”, anyway? Probably exactly those viewers who’ll watch “Red Mars” no matter what.
After five seasons, the oldest characters will be 45-year-olds played by 40-year old actors.
No problem here. It’s not like they have to deal with a lot of child characters in these books. THAT’s hard. What they usually have to do with child characters is to re-imagine them to be 16, give them a love interest (heterosexual, same race, same social class, with exceptions to be made for hero-princess relationships), and have them played by a 25-year-old actor. That way, it doesn’'t break the age range, but it’s just a lot more work to change that much about the story.
I feel torn. I like passing these books on - almost like a secret - to people I know will truly appreciate them. But if this happens, and it is even passingly good, and Robinson is rewarded massively, then I am all in favor.
Spike TV? I’m less excited now. But who knows…maybe this will be their Breaking Bad/Mad Men moment.
Or am I unfairly judging them? I tend to lump them in with the SciFi channel.
If I remember the books right most characters were already older than that at the beginning of the story (which makes sense since the first wave of settlers on Mars would have to be highly trained astronauts). The only reason so many of the original characters are able to have offspring at all is due to advances in anti-aging and reproductive medicine.
I’m normally rather gentle when it comes to adaptations- I fully recognize that a book and an adaptation are distinct pieces of art, and that the former will continue to be beautiful, and the latter cannot help but be steered in positive directions by its antecedent, and so forth.
Except this time, if they screw this up, I’m burning down the building. Maya and Sax and Nirgal and Nadia are my friends, and if they get turned into some whiz bang action packed monstrosity my rage will be…substantial.
I only made it about halfway through the second book, if memory serves. I should give them another shot.
