When Hollywood Reads My Mind

AMC, which two years ago I don't think anyone expected to be the new go-to sight for compelling, adult TV series, is so far two-for-two. Mad Men and Breaking Bad are two of my favorite series airing right now.

And now they have made a very promising move for number three. According to this, their next series will be based on the first book in what is probably my favorite science fiction series ever - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. The Mars trilogy is an epic, complicated saga of the colonization of Mars that is stunning in the level of scientific detail it packs into its story. Robinson convincingly describes the science behind such ideas as terraforming and space elevators, making the trilogy much more than yet another adventures in space tale.

Which does, though, beg a question. How will all of that science (and in the book there is a lot of it - he can go on for pages describing the geography of the planet in minute detail) get dealt with in a series? In a novel, Robinson can lay the omniscient narrator card and just describe stuff for us. In a series, that's a lot harder.

Still, I'm very excited by the news, and anxious to see how this develops over the coming months.

Until Whenever