Back in 2011, Paramount bought the rights to John Scalzi’s sci-fi novel **Old Man’s War, with Wolfgang Petersen attached to direct and David Self to write the film. Since then, it’s floated through the development void but never quite turned into a movie, and now the US SyFy channel has taken over the project, looking to gear up a TV series called Ghost Brigades{
Scalzi’s novel, the first in a series of four so far, was originally published back in 2005, though the author actually released it online before that. It follows the adventures of soldier John Perry who, after his wife dies when he’s 75, agrees to sign up for the Colonial Defence Forces. In exchange for his service and the fact he’ll never return to Earth, his consciousness is uploaded into a healthy, augmented new body and he’s sent off to battle a variety of alien forces caught up in a territorial scramble for the available planets of the galaxy.
The books have been favourably compared with the likes of Robert Heinlein (Scalzi has talked about his appreciation for the writer’s work) and Joe Haldeman (of The Forever War), and offer both intriguing concepts and great characters. Ghost Brigades actually takes its title from Scalzi’s second book in the series, published in 2006. Jake Thornton and Ben Lustig are attached to write the first script, with Petersen still aboard as producer.
With luck, this could be a new Battlestar Galactica for the channel, since the book series certainly has enough entertaining material to power such a show. It also marks the second TV show in development from a Scalzi property; his Star Trek-style book Redshirts was optioned by FX earlier this year.