Fans of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series will be excited to learn that her Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Ancillary Justice has been optioned for television!
Leckie shared the news on her blog, adding in the necessary caveats that “option” doesn’t automatically mean “greenlit.” However, she’s already had at least one talk with the production companies emphasizing how she would like the series to handle gender and race.
Production company Fabrik (The Killing) and Fox Television Studios (The Americans) have the option to adapt Ancillary Justice. Leckie also mentioned that she has already spoken with Fabrik about her concerns in expressing gender on-screen, as well as avoiding whitewashing:
I am also aware, of course, that bringing AJ to any sort of screen (not counting your eReader screen, of course!) would be…an interestingly difficult project. I made sure to have a conversation with the folks at Fabrik about my specific concerns–namely, the approach to gender, and the issue of whitewashing (as in, I do not want to see the book whitewashed, I would like to namedrop LeGuin and mention her Earthsea experience here, thank you). I was very pleased with their response. And in fact, if I had been the least bit unhappy with how that conversation came out, I would not be writing this blog post now.
The fact remains that even with all the best intentions in the world, there’s a lot of leeway to really misstep badly in trying to bring AJ to any kind of visual medium. On the other hand, there is quite a lot of potential for a really good team to do something really cool, that may or may not be what I was trying to do with the book, but that is still something new and marvelous. And actually, I think the best adaptations work that way. It’s an exciting thought.
One commenter on her post pointed out that a TV series would require a weekly reminder of the premise, especially how main character Breq goes from being the colossal Justice of Toren starship to trapped in a single body at the start of the novel. They’ll just have to come up with a pithy, 30-second primer like Battlestar Galactica did.
Wow. I’m not even sure how they’d manage it, what with the gender of nearly all the characters being left completely undefined. It runs the risk that having them acted out on a screen would “lock in” the genders for people who then go on to read the book.
I am constantly stunned by the reception this utterly mediocre piece of literature receives.
I can kind of see how someone would want this as a basis for a TV piece, specifically considering the success of battlestar galatica, which I can see quite some parallels with.
Anyway, I personally think this book is a waste of time, but hey…
Yes, I have no idea how gender works in AJ, let alone how it would be televised. I mean, Breq always refers to Seivarden as she but the non-Radch doctor refers to Seivarden as he. As Breq is very clear he/she is horrible at determining genders, and that Radch citizens don’t differentiate this way, does this mean Seivarden actually looks male (based on the more objective, non Radch observer visual) or somehow just androgenous? I have no idea what Leckie envisioned or is trying to say.
The whole Justice of Toren visuals would look awesome on a TV screen.
You may be right, @1, about locking in genders, but you could also argue that the pronoun use in the book does that anyway. I find it absolutely impossible, no matter how hard I try, to imagine Awn and most of the walk-on characters as anything but biologically female, and we are told in passing that Seivarden is a biological male. I remain unconvinced that Leckie succeeded in depicting a plausible non-gendered society, overall.
OTOH, it might just be that television could REDUCE the overdetermination issue; intentionally confounding costume, makeup, jewelry and body language choices regardless of the biological sex of the actors might get Leckie’s point across in a way that her language, IMHO, does not.
RobMRobM, you’ve basically hit on my fundamental issue with Leckie’s worldbuilding. It seems unquestionable, from the doctor’s evidence, that Seivarden is a biological male, and this and other evidence (such as Breq’s internal monologue on her return to Radch civilization and her focus on external markers that other cultures would gender) strongly imply that, although they don’t seem to have functional reproductive organs without surgery, Radch do have distinguishable biological secondary sex characteristics. I find it deeply implausible that Justice-of-Toren would consider this to be useless information, given hir medical functionalities. And it’s not simply that Justice-of-Toren does not understand gender because it is an artificial intelligence; the doctor assumes that Breq is a normal biological Radch human and therefore implies that all Radch do not understand gender.
I also take issue with some of the use of language. While I am glad that Leckie does not go in for invented language (it’s not NECESSARY to do that, and I prefer that authors avoid it unless they are good enough linguists to do it well), the English “versions” of many of the utterances that Breq finds difficult to correctly gender do not conform to common or straightforward patterns of gender in language–they don’t even all have pronouns. Are we supposed to imagine something such as gendered verbs? That’s not categorically impossible, but I feel that if Leckie is not prepared to deal with technical linguistics, it’s better that she not go there.
Honestly, I’ve been trying to keep my annoyance with AJ under wraps, especially until after Hugo voting closed, but I agree with @2 that it’s really quite overrated, probably for political reasons. I’m not saying this because of my own political ax to grind–a convincing portrayal of ungendered society would be very interesting to read–but because I don’t find Leckie’s version convincing. It seems more like wish fulfillment without the intellectual chops to back it up. In other words, to me AJ read rather like a poor man’s Le Guin, lacking Le Guin’s expertise in linguistics and anthropology which are central to the impact of her work.
I enjoyed AJ quite a lot.
An AJ TV series would have to do some very interesting things to capture both the gender feel and the distributed consciousness feel of the book.
Why would one want to visualize a book that lives from not visualizing most things and leaving them to interpretation? What would be the point of that?
While I dont see them able to transpose it to television all that well, it has to end up more entertaining than the book was…
To me, the distributed consciousness theme of the book was more important than the gendered theme – its part of the plot. Its been interesting to me to see how discussion of this book has been dominated by the gender choices, and its come to be defined as the central issue of the book even though its more of a throwaway background detail. But clearly its a detail that is very important to many readers and has a significant emotional impact. More than it did for me, anyway.
I’m wondering in the TV show would they portray all of Breq’s ancillaries, as the same person? Because the way I read the book – they would not all look the same. Maybe same haircut and outfit.
But the ancillaries are former free thinking humans. So they should look as different as the normal crowd at a mall. Yet this might mess with a TV audience.
And yes, in a society that has no “gender”, their language should have a pronoun that does not use he or she. They should have their own that is not ‘it’ either.
It is also something Breq should not spend so much time thinking about.
I’m rather meh about the book. Was rather annoyed when it was clearly a “First in a set.” But it does have some interesting ideas and concepts. Maybe I’m just not broadly read enough to know how often it has been done.
@Braid Tug
I dont really understand why “it” would be such a bad choice, but I am not a native english speaker.
And even though I was not thrilled by the book either, I might actually buy the german translation just to see how the translator handled all the gendered german words (the pistol=die Pistole, female; the revolver=der Revolver, male; the rifle=das Gewehr, neutral).
Wow. I have no idea how they’ll attempt to pull this off, but if it does get shot, I’ll be watching it. And credit-where-credit-is-due: I think it’s pretty cool that someone is going after a meaty, award-sweeping novel – something that is not easily adaptable. And, at least at this point, appears to not be watering it down.
It’s really pretty cool to see television embracing SF/F again – and specifically space operas. Leviathan Wakes, Ghost Brigades, and now Ancillary Justice? BEAM ME THE HELL UP.
@11: The biggest objection I hear over and over about using “it” when refereeing to humans – is that it dehumanize them. “It” turns a person into an object. In the current mindset of most native English speakers.
Other writers have used created words: hir, ba, mir, etc..
No, I’m not sure what has been done in other languages, but it would be interesting to see.
Fantastic news, and even better if the show actually ends up getting made.
I agree with Bookworm. I think it’s an excellent work of science fiction, in a rather traditional mode, which deals in an interesting way with issues about artificial intelligence and distributed consciousness, and also about imperialism, political agency and so on. It is not primarily about gender. The gender device, whether or not it’s totally plausible, is I think a useful device to stop gender becoming central to the story; if the characters had marked genders their relations would take on new significance, which would distract from what is fundamentally going on. The way in which fandom has settled on the gender device as the central thing of the work rather bemuses me.