There’s another series on the horizon based on the works of Ken Liu. Deadline reports that Amazon Studios is developing a series based on a forthcoming story from the author, The Cleaners.
The Cleaners will be part of an Amazon Original Stories package—a collection of short stories released on Kindle based around a theme. Amazon has released a handful of such collections involving science fiction and fantasy authors, such as near-future collection Forward (which included Veronica Roth, Blake Crouch, N.K. Jemisin, Amor Towles, Paul Tremblay and Andy Weir), and climate change-focused Warmer (featuring Jess Walter, Lauren Groff, Jesse Kellerman, Edan Lepucki, Skip Horack, and Sonya Larson).
This forthcoming collection will be called Faraway, and according to Deadline, will feature retold fairytales. Liu’s entry is a reimagination of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and The Pea.
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The story is set in the near future, where objects can carry memories of their prior owners, and some people can relive those memories when they touch them. A young man inherits his family’s cleaning business—a service that helps to remove the residual memories from objects.
Amazon has set up the story as a series, with Dominic Orlando, a writer on Netflix’s The OA, and Orlando Bloom, serving as executive producer alongside Liu. There’s no word on when it’ll debut or who will be cast in it at this stage.
The Cleaners is just one of many irons that Liu has in the fire. Earlier this year, AMC greenlit two seasons of an animated series based on his stories, Pantheon, about uploaded consciousness. Last month, Netflix announced that it was adapting Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (which Liu translated) as a TV series from the creators of Game of Thrones, and FilmNation announced that it had acquired Liu’s novelette, “The Hidden Girl” for a potential TV series.
This move also highlights a unique ability on Amazon’s part: the ability to generate its own content via a network of its own publishing imprints, like 47 North or Amazon Original Stories. Last year, Amazon Studios optioned its own IP for the first time, developing a series based on its romance collection, The Fairer Sex—a move that could signal that it’s interested in developing a pipeline of stories in house that funnel right from its store and onto the screens of Prime subscribers. If it makes it through the development process, Liu’s story could be one new example of this phenomenon.
