A slew of well-known SF and fantasy projects are in development through Startling Inc., including THE BELGARIAD, THE DYING EARTH and RED MARS

Thanks to detective work by the team at Westeros.org, it's been revealed that a surprisingly large number of classic SF and fantasy projects are in development via the Startling Inc. production company. The company is run by Vince Gerardis, a producer on Game of Thrones.

Some of the projects have been known about for a while and some seem to be stuck in development hell. Most seem to be speculative options, with the realistic prospect of making it to the screen being unclear. Still, it's worth breaking down the projects on the list:

Ringworld (MGM/Amazon): based on Larry Niven's classic 1970 novel about a huge, ring-shaped megastructure completely enclosing a star. Optioned in 2017, it is believed this project was moved onto the backburner some time ago and is not currently in active development.

Wild Cards (Universal Cable Pictures/Peacock): see more here.

Dark Winds (AMC): A detective series based on Tony Hillerman's novel The Dark Wind. Originally in the works at HBO, but presumably sold on to AMC since then.

The Ice Dragon (Warner Brothers Animation): an animated feature film based on George R.R. Martin's 1980 children's story. In development since 2018.

Eon (MWM, formerly Madison Wells Media): likely a project based on Greg Bear's classic 1985 "big dumb object" SF novel, Eon, the first volume in the Thistledown series.

A Song of Ice and Fire (The Works): speculated by the Westeros team to be a live experience or show based on the novels.

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (Phoenix): a project based on Robert Heinlein's 1942 novella.

Sandkings (Netflix): see more here.

Passengers (Groundswell/Endeavour Content): likely a project based on Robert Silverberg's 1969 short story about alien beings who possess human bodies at will. Unrelated to the 2016 Chris Pratt/Jennifer Lawrence film.

Inconstant Moon (21 Laps/Picture Start): a project based on Larry Niven's 1971 short story.

Dry (Bruce Cohen Productions/MML): this is more ambiguous; possibly a project based on Neal and Jarrod Shusterman's 2018 novel about climate catastrophe.

Hawksbill Station (First Generation): a project based on Robert Silverberg's 1967 novel about a penal colony established in the distant past, from where prisoners cannot hope to escape.

Dayworld (Warner Brothers Television): a project based on the 1985 novel by Philip José Farmer where a chronically overcrowded Earth is managed by having only one-seventh of the population active at any time, spending the rest of the time in suspended animation.

Roadmarks (HBO): see more here.

The Postman (Playtone/Warner Brothers Television): a new take on David Brin's 1985 post-apocalyptic novel. The novel was previously adapted - mediocrely - as a film in 1997 with Kevin Costner.

More Than Human (Good Banana/HBO): an adaptation of Theodore Sturgeon's 1953 novel in which humans develop superpowers which they can blend together to create incredible effects.

OK (Anonymous Content): No idea on this one.

Arabian Nights (Tomorrow/ITV): Presumably another take on the classic mythological story cycle originally known as One Thousand and One Nights.

Rose Hill (Leeding Media): There's several possibilities here, including Julie Garwood's Claybornes of Rose Hill novel series (previously filmed in 1997 as Rose Hill) and Pamela Grandstaff's Rose Hill Mysteries series.

PLAY (Dimitri Vegas): No idea on this one.

Weetzie Bat (Stampede/UCP): A film based on the Dangerous Angels novel series by Francesca Lia Block. Ana Taylor-Joy, Nick Robinson, Theodore Pellerin and Keiynan Lonsdale were attached to star and Justin Kelly to direct, but there has been no word on the project since 2018. It might be that this is a new take on the same idea (since Stampede and/or UCP do not appear to have been involved in the 2018 project).

Clean (Anonymous): A surprisingly popular novel title, making it hard to pin down what it's based on.

Sleepless (Stampede): Most likely, a project based on Nancy Kress's Sleepless trilogy (starting with Beggars in Spain) about a new generation of humans genetically-engineered not to need sleep, who rapidly become far more intelligent and capable than "sleepy" humans and threaten to supplant them.

Up the Line (Village Roadshow): a project based on Robert Silverberg's 1969 time travel novel.

The Mars Trilogy (Fox): a project based on Kim Stanley Robinson's multi-award winning Mars Trilogy of novels (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars); previously in development at Spike Television with J. Michael Straczynski, where it was dropped after being a poor fit for the network. 

The Belgariad (City Hill): a project based on David and Leigh Eddings' five-volume epic fantasy saga (credited to David alone, but in later life he confirmed his wife's full involvement in the writing process). As a major epic fantasy work of the 1980s, it's been developed for adaptation several times but never quite made it into active development. Its prospects have probably not been helped by the recent revelation that the authors were child abusers who did jail time in the 1970s for beating and imprisoning their foster children.

Billion Dollar Boy (Phoenix): a project based on the 1997 novel by Charles Sheffield, in which a spoiled rich kid from a future Earth is abandoned on a remote space station and has to work hard to survive.

The Dying Earth (A24): a project based on the four-volume science fantasy series by Jack Vance. Hugely influential and important, The Dying Earth directly inspired Dungeons & Dragons (which uses the same magic system) and the entire "Dying Earth" subgenre of science fantasy.

Flood/Ark (Anonymous/Epix): a project based on the high-concept SF duology of the same name by British SF author Stephen Baxter, about the Earth becoming uninhabitable when a previously-unknown body of water in Earth's mantle is released into the oceans, causing catastrophic global flooding and forcing humanity to adapt or flee the planet altogether.

Montmartre (Stampede): No idea on this one, except possibly a project related to Picasso.

RPM (Infinito): No idea on this one either.

It's likely only a small number of these will ever make it to the screen, and it'll be interesting to see which ones.

RED MARS TV show put on hold

Spike's Red Mars TV series, based on Kim Stanley Robinson's award-winning Mars Trilogy of novels, has been put on indefinite hold following some high-profile departures.

In particular, it's been confirmed that J. Michael Straczynski's involvement will now be restricted to the pilot script and possibly some additional episodes later on. Spike offered Straczynski the showrunner role, but he has bowed out citing other commitments (presumably including Netflix's Sense8, his collaboration with the Wachowskis which was recently renewed for a second season). Peter Noah stepped in as showrunner, but has now left following "creative differences" with the network. The project is now on hold whilst Spike figures out what to do next.

The "creative differences" has raise concern with fans. The Mars Trilogy is a mostly cerebral, political and scientific story about the realities of colonising Mars. It slow-paced and has very few action sequences. The story also unfolds over some 190 years, with the characters surviving thanks to the introduction of an age rejuvenation therapy. Turning this story into a compelling drama would be a tall order for HBO or Netflix, but Spike TV (which tends more towards action fare and reality shows) always felt like an awkward fit. Fans had been hoping that the success of The Martian, with its emphasis (more or less) on real science, would encourage Spike to stick closer to the tone and pacing of the novels.

RED MARS adaptation greenlit with BABYLON 5 showrunner in charge

Spike TV has given a full season order for Red Mars, a TV series based on Kim Stanley Robinson's classic Mars Trilogy of novels. J. Michael Straczynski, the creator/producer/writer of Babylon 5 and recently the co-creator and writer of Sense8 for Netflix, will be the primary writer and showrunner on the series.

Robinson's trilogy consists of the novels Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996), along with a companion volume of short stories and essays, The Martians (1999). The trilogy opens in the year 2026 when fifty men and fifty women - the First Hundred - travel to Mars on the colonisation ship Ares. The opening part of the first novel covers the months-long journey out to Mars, with the scientists and engineers getting to know one another and dealing with crises like solar storms which threaten to kill them before they even get to the planet. During the voyage an ideological and philosophical debate begins which eventually comes to dominate the colonisation saga: whether Mars should be left in the state it is found or terraformed to support human life.

The rest of the first novel concerns the building of Underhill, the first town on Mars, and the establishment of an outpost on its moon Phobos. As the years pass more colonists are sent and technology rapidly develops, with canyons and craters being roofed and pressurised to create the first towns and, later, cities. A life-extension drug is developed which allows characters at the start of the story to still be alive and in excellent health forty years later. However, as the population of Mars swells, so does the control of the meta-national megacorporations which have displaced the nation-state as the primary power on Earth. This sparks a desire for independence, and the scene is set for a bloody revolution. The later novels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, cover an additional 200 years of future history.

J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 featured a long-running, series-spanning storyline about the Mars colony's desire for independence and freedom.

It is likely that Straczynski will be changing some things about the books. First off, the timeline will likely be changed (since we are more like thirty years from the establishment of the first colony on Mars rather than eleven). We are also likely to see a lot more action and drama, particularly during the events of the latter two books which are more free of plot incident than the first novel. However, as Babylon 5 and Sense8 both show, Straczynski is a thoughtful writer who can write entertaining television even about controversial issues like religion, immigration and the morality of science, so don't expect these elements to be dumbed down too much. Indeed, Straczynski appears to have been a fan of the novels, with the Mars storyline in Babylon 5 feeling at least very partially inspired by Robinson's books (that were released simultaneously with the show's opening seasons).

Vince Gerardis, who helped shepherd Game of Thrones to the screen, will co-produce alongside Straczynski, who will write and be the primary showrunner. Kim Stanley Robinson will serve as a creative consultant on the project, but it's not yet been confirmed if he will write any episodes.

Spike TV, known for its more young adult male demographic than its thoughtful, hard SF one, appears to be appealing to a new audience with this project. They have also made a significant investment in the new show, ordering a full 10-episode first season instead of a pilot. It is possible that the success of the Ridley Scott film The Martian inspired them to move forward with the project.

According to Straczynski, his work on Red Mars will not interfere with his writing for the second season of Sense8, which was recently commissioned by Netflix.

Joe Straczynski to pen adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson's MARS TRILOGY

J. Michael Straczynski, the acclaimed creator-writer of Babylon 5 amongst many other projects, has been tapped to write Spike TV's adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

This is an interesting match. The Mars novels came out at the same time Babylon 5 was starting, and it feels like Straczynski may have tapped them for some inspiration, particularly with the subplot about terrorists on Mars fighting for independence. B5 showed that JMS 'got' Mars, even in the brief parts of the series set there, so if he can bring that same touch to this project that should be great for the atmosphere and visuals.

How much of Robinson's incredibly slow-burning narrative will remain intact or be sacrificed at the altar of action and more compressed character development remains to be seen, but Straczynski is a reasonably confident pair of hands to put the project in.

Spike picks up Kim Stanley Robinson's MARS TRILOGY for TV

Spike TV are developing a TV series based on Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars Trilogy of novels. The proposed TV series will take the its name from the first novel in the series, Red Mars, with Kim Stanley Robinson serving as a creative consultant.

Consisting of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996), the trilogy spans almost two hundred years (between 2027 and 2212) and depicts the colonisation of Mars by the initial First Hundred group and subsequent waves of immigration. As the years pass, socio-economic tensions rise between the original settlers and later arrives, and between Mars and an Earth increasingly desperate to offload its bloated population (threatened by viruses and climate change) on the new world. The rising threat of war, independence and the impact of a new medical science that retards the ageing process are all key storylines in a story that involves dozens of major characters.

James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd worked on a mini-series idea based on The Mars Trilogy for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This project was not tremendously faithful to the novels - rumours abounded of a 'sexy female android' character when no such entity exists in the books - but it did wind up being developed for several years at AMC. It was not greenlit, but it did introduce Hurd to the team at AMC that eventually ended up making The Walking Dead. Five years ago, AMC resurrected the project with writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh on board (Die Hard with a Vengeance, Welcome to the Jungle, The Punisher, Armageddon), but eventually passed.

Spike TV are best-known for their reality programming, and news that this project was in development with them came as a surprise.If Spike treat the subject seriously (i.e. don't turn it into a revolutionary shoot 'em up) and put some serious money behind it, this could be both a very good TV series and mark a change in direction for the channel. The potential for this going horribly wrong is very high, however.

Wertzone Classics: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

2027. A hundred of Earth's most skilled engineers and scientists are dispatched to Mars, braving radiation exposure to land on the Red Planet and establish a permanent scientific outpost. Their goal is to establish whether Mars can ever be a viable target for settlement and colonisation, and if terraforming the planet is possible or desirable.


Earth is overcrowded and choking, with national governments and transnational supercorporations (whose annual balance sheets outstrip the GDPs of most of the world's countries) feuding for control. Soon, vast reservoirs of water are discovered in hidden aquifers deep below the Martian surface, making colonies self-sustainable. To the transnats, this means that Mars can become a dumping ground for Earth's excess population. When valuable mineral deposits that Earth is crying out for are also discovered on Mars, then its exploitation for the benefit of the people of Earth becomes inevitable. The resulting clash of wills and desires of the transnational Earth corporations and the beleaguered settlers on Mars forced to accept hundreds of thousands of immigrants they cannot cope with can only have one possible outcome: revolution, and the cry for independence.

Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars Trilogy chronicles humanity's colonisation of Mars, beginning in the early 21st Century and extending over a period of some two centuries. The first book, which covers a period of some forty years, sees the initial settling of Mars by the First Hundred, the welcome arrival of additional waves of colonists intent on scientific research and then the more challenging problems of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of economic migrants, refugees and outcasts on a world that is not ready for them, and the resulting tensions between the newcomers and old-timers, and between the authorities on Mars and Earth.

The success of the trilogy as a whole is debatable, but this first volume, at least, is a masterpiece. Robinson's story rotates through a number of POV characters amongst the initial settlers, the First Hundred, and it rapidly becomes clear that most of them are somewhat unreliable narrators. Maya's complaints in her own POV of her 'important problems' being ignored by the base psychiatrist are given another perspective in her friend Nadia's POV, which reveals Maya is more interested in a trivial love triangle between herself and two Americans rather than in the colonisation of Mars, whilst the psychiatrist Michel's POV reveals that he is giving Maya colossal amounts of time and attention (to the detriment of his own mental health) which is unappreciated. Robinson repeats this trick several times, showing that the ultra-laidback and inspirational John Boone (the First Man on Mars) achieves his famous demeanour through the assistance of addictive drugs, whilst self-deprecating Nadia is actually the most universally-respected of the First Hundred. Character is thus built up in layers, from both internal viewpoints and external sources, making these central characters very well-realised (although characters outside the central coterie can be a little on the thin side).

Whilst the characters are important, it is Mars itself which is the central figure of the book. Robinson brings a dead planet to vivid life, emphasising the differences in terrain and character between the frozen northern polar icecap and the water-cut channels in the depths of the Valles Marineris, with the massive mountains of Tharsis towering high into the atmosphere and colonists eagerly staking claims to future beachfront properties in Hellas, the lowest point on Mars and the first place to see the benefits of terraforming. The ideas of Mars as it is now as a pristine, beautiful but harsh landscape and the habitable world it could be are sharply contrasted, and the rights and wrongs of terraforming form a core argument of the novel. I get the impression that Robinson sides with Ann Clayborne's view that the planet should be left untouched, but he is realistic enough to know this will not happen, if Mars can be settled and exploited in a way that is economically feasible. Mars in this work becomes a success of SF worldbuilding to compete with Helliconia and Arrakis, losing only a few points for actually existing.

On the downside, Robinson hits a few bad notes. Some of these are unavoidable consequences of the book being nearly twenty years old. Even in 1992 the notion that the Chinese would not play a major role in the financing and undertaking of a Mars colonisation mission only forty years hence was somewhat fanciful, but today it is almost unthinkable. More notably, the global recession has made the possibility of a manned mission to Mars, let alone a full-scale colonisation effort, by the 2020s somewhat dubious. Of course, these are issues Robinson could not hope to predict in the optimistic, post-Soviet Union years of the early 1990s.


Other problems are more notable. Robinson goes to some lengths to make the pro-terraforming and anti-terraforming sides of the debate both understandable and intelligent, but his political sympathies are much more one-sided. The pro-Martian independence brigade have charismatic leaders and a grass-roots movement of plucky, honest-men-against-the-machine supporters to their name, whilst the pro-Earth-control movement is led by a fundamentalist conservative Christian and resorts to weapons and mass-slaughter extremely easily. Robinson, to his credit, recognises this problem in later books and tries to repair the damage somewhat (Phyllis, presented extremely negatively in Red Mars, is shown in a more sympathetic light in later volumes), but there remains a feeling of political bias in this first volume. In addition, it sometimes feels that Robinson really wants the reader to know about the years of research he put into the book, with tangents and divergences which make the book feel like half a novel and half a factual science volume on how the possible colonisation of Mars might happen. For those fascinated by the real-life plans to terraform Mars (like me) this isn't an issue, but for some it may be. It is also, by far, the biggest problem the sequels face.

Nevertheless, the sheer, massive scope and complexity of Red Mars makes up for this. There is an overwhelming feeling running through this novel unlike almost any other hard SF novel ever published, that this might actually happen. Maybe not as soon as 2027, maybe not with such a determined push towards colonisation and terraforming right from the off, but one day, barring the collapse of our civilisation, we will go to Mars, and many of the challenges and problems faced by the First Hundred in this book are issues that will need to be overcome to make that possibility a reality.

Plus, and this cannot be undervalued, the dry and more sedentary tone of the earlier parts of the book are made up for by the final 100 pages or so, which contains one sequence which ranks amongst the most memorable and stunning moments of SF imagery achieved in the history of the genre to date. Robinson may have the image of being a bit of a laidback Californian optimist, but he sets to blowing stuff up at the end of the book with a relish that makes even Greg Bear look unambitious.

Red Mars (****½) is an awe-inspiring feat of SF worldbuilding and a vital novel on the colonisation of our neighbouring world, let down by a few moments of naivete and simplistic straw-manning of political points of view not to Robinson's liking. Overcoming this, the central characters are fascinating, the sheer scope of the book is stunning and the climatic revolution sequence is dramatic and spectacular. The novel is available (with a nice new British cover) in the UK and USA.