Syfy turning John Scalzi's Old Man's War into a series!

 Via Hollywood Reporter:

The NBCUniversal-owned cable network has put into development Ghost Brigades, a drama based on John Scalzi's Hugo-nominated Old Man's War universe book series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The NeverEnding Story's Wolfgang Petersen will oversee development on the project alongside Scott Stuber (Safe House), with Jake Thornton and Ben Lustig (Winter's Knight) on board to pen the first script. The drama hails from Universal Cable Productions, Petersen's Radiant Productions and Stuber's Bluegrass Films.

Excellent. Old Man's War is one of my favorite scifi novels and the rest of the series is pretty damn good too. To give you an idea of how good OMW is, I started re-reading the thing like ten minutes after I finished it. I was probably fifteen pages in before I stopped myself. That has never happened before or since.

The premise is (and spoiler warning, folks) that the John Perry enlists with the Colonial Defense Force, the military arm of the interstellar government that manages human colonies, the Colonial Union. The catch? Perry is 75 years old and the CDF's entire military force is based around geriatrics. The spoiler bit is how they make use of people who would likely break a hip just matching - genetically engineered bodies created from each person's DNA, but mostly comprised of non-human material. The CDF transfers each person's mind into one of these new bodies, then transfers them into brand spanking new cloned human bodies after their term of service is completed.

The book is military science fiction, but mixed with a good bit of humor and wit. The title of the TV show is interesting, as Ghost Brigades is the title of the second book in the series and doesn't really feature Perry at all. The series itself is going to be a mix of the entire series, rather than a straight adaption of just the first book. The name change makes even more sense, then. I mean, having a show called "Old Man's War" isn't going to attract a ton of viewers.

John Scalzi has a series of posts over on his blog about the new series. This isn't his only work getting the TV treatment. FX is turning one of his other books, Redshirts, into a miniseries. Interestingly, Syfy is also turning James S. A. Corey's Expanse series into a show. Looks like the channel is finally shifting away from reality shows and back towards science fiction.