FilmNation has acquired one of Ken Liu’s many stories—a novelette called “The Hidden Girl”, which it intends to adapt into a TV series, according to Variety. Liu will serve as executive producer on the project.
The story was originally published in Gardner Dozois’s 2017 anthology The Book of Swords (and was later reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine—read it here), and follows a 10-year-old girl who was kidnapped and trained by a group of female assassins who travel through time.
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The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
The story appeared in Liu’s recently-released second short story collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and joins a growing number of potential adaptations under his belt. This news comes just weeks after Netflix announced that it’s adapting Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (which he translated) as a series, on which he’ll serve as a consulting producer. Additionally, AMC greenlit a two-season animated series, Pantheon, which is based on several of his short stories.
The studio acquired this new project through a bidding war, and Stefanie Berk, its executive vice president of television, noted that they’re “excited to expand our relationship with the multi-talented Ken Liu into television,” and were “blown away by Ken’s unique crafting of an ever-expanding, genre bending world that manages to tell an epic story about family and sisterhood through the lens of a female multi-dimensional assassin.”
There’s no word on when or where the series will debut, but Variety notes that they’re currently searching for a series showrunner and director to helm the project.
