A whole lotta scifi coming to TV soon

First of all, most of this news comes from Adam Whitehead's most excellent The Wertzone, so big tip of the hat to him.

Let's do a run down:

• Spike just announced that they're going to turn Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy into a series. Reminder that Spike is the channel with the MMA, wrestling (not for long), and a plethora of reality shows. Hopefully they won't fuck it up.
• Syfy is doing a ton. They're adapting Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End into a miniseries, as well as turning James S. A. Corey's Expanse and John Scalzi's Old Man's War into TV series. Finally, they have a show based on the movie 12 Monkeys set to premiere this January. Interesting stuff, but then again, this is the network that brought us such turds as Children of Dune, Riverworld, and Earthsea, to say nothing of all of their ghost hunting shows.
• FX is doing a limited series based on Scalzi's Redshirts.
• HBO, meanwhile, is stepping into the science fiction arena by optioning The Foundation series. Given the size and scope that Game of Thrones has, this could be interesting. I don't doubt for a minute that what ends up on TV will differ greatly from the source material, but that's probably not a big deal. I mean, even Isaac Asimov couldn't figure out why the Foundation Trilogy was so popular. At the very least, we're getting boobs and sex and more boobs. Probably full frontal too.

I'm being somewhat flippant towards Spike and Syfy because the former has never done a scifi series (to my knowledge) and the latter has a bad track record when it comes to adapting written scifi to television. On the other hand, Syfy seems to be at least making an effort to live up to their name, which is more than can be said for other niche channels.