Kaliane Bradley has had a very good year. Her fantastic debut novel The Ministry of Time got acquired by major publishers on both sides of the pond, and is at the center of a top-line marketing push ahead of its release in May. Not only that, but immediately after acquisition the book’s screen rights were snapped up in a massive auction by none other than A24, who planned to add it to their burgeoning television slate.
The book is incredible, and I’m not just saying that because I was privileged enough to watch it slowly come to life, weeping over early drafts and suchlike. The starred Kirkus review calls it a “gripping, gleefully delicious debut” which “offers a meaningful, nuanced perspective on the challenges we face, the choices we make, and the way we live and love today.” True!!!
But Kaliane’s good fortune, and the prospective enjoyment of what ought to be an unadulteratedly joyful moment in any author’s life—the release of her first book—has been soured by a social media harassment campaign determined to see her book and show both fail.
Why? Well, it comes down to semantics, basically.
If you didn’t know, an author does not choose the title her book has upon publication. The Ministry of Time originally had a different title, as do many drafts. But before publication, an author’s team will often convene to choose a title that’s the most marketable it is possible to be. The book is about a civil servant working for an unnamed Ministry which plucks people out of history and brings them to the future as “expats.” So there you go: The Ministry of Time.
Did the publishers realize that name was shared by a Spanish TV show which ran for four seasons between 2015 and 2020, El ministerio del tiempo? Possibly not. Even if they did, they probably didn’t care. Neither did A24, who announced their major adaptation in partnership with the BBC last week.
And that was their mistake.
Because the co-creator of El ministerio del tiempo, one Javier Olivares, took offense. Declaring the novel and show plagiarism and use of his intellectual property, he whipped Spanish fans on Twitter into a frenzy, resulting in Kaliane’s excited announcement being smacked with a Community Label unilaterally declaring The Ministry of Time a “rip-off.”
Even after the BBC assured him that any similarities between the two properties were coincidental, Olivares has not backed down, and the story is now major news in Spain.
He actually has a history of this kind of accusation. In 2016 his company sued the producers of NBC’s show Timeless for being a ripoff of El ministerio del tiempo. Now, this was on slightly less shaky ground, given that NBC had been in talks with the Spanish producers to do an American remake of their show before the guys from Supernatural rocked up with a time travel show of their own, but the whole thing might well have raised his hackles and kept them permanently up about stuff like this, making The Ministry of Time an inevitable target.
The actual stories—Kaliane’s book and Olivares’ show—are very different, other than for the basic premise of a time-travel agency full of people from throughout history. Which as literally anyone could tell you, is shared by media from Legends of Tomorrow to Time Squad to Doctor Who to Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series.
But because the book isn’t out yet, and the show is years away, that vacuum of information has given ammo to thousands of Spanish fans who, in defense of their cancelled show, have risen en-masse to Goodreads-bomb The Ministry of Time, and spam negatively replies under any positive tweet or post about it, including my own TikTok from months ago.
The communications scholar Alice Marwick’s formulation of “morally motivated networked harassment” is probably the single most useful bit of research to emerge in the past few years for anyone looking to understand the dynamics of outrage and cruelty on social media platforms, and encapsulates precisely what is happening here.
MMNH, according to Marwick, occurs when:
a member of a social network or online community accuses an individual (less commonly a brand or organization) of violating the networks’ moral norms. Frequently, the accusation is amplified by a highly followed network node, triggering moral outrage throughout the networked audience. Members of the network send harassing messages to the individual, reinforcing their own adherence to the norm and signaling network membership, thus re-inscribing the norm and reinforcing the network’s values. The accusation is often escalated by the networked audience, fueling moral outrage and justifying further harassment.
The highly followed network node in this case is Javier Olivares, and the networked audience is the existing, large, and loyal fanbase of El ministerio del tiempo.
Do I hate that this is happening to my friend? Obviously. But do I understand why? Yes, pretty easily. Like Olivares says himself:
Olivares also highlighted that a simple Google search for "Ministry of Time" would reveal the Spanish series, indicating that the BBC should have been aware of its existence.
It’s not that the BBC wasn’t aware of its existence. The problem was that they probably just didn’t care—same goes for the publisher. So what that a show in another country had a similar name? Any research probably didn’t go beyond doing a quick summary check to see that they weren’t too similar. But that missed the biggest potential roadblock, the one that’s rising up right now, regardless of what’s in the actual text: the fandom element.
For so many corporations and culture industry operators, fandom is still only seen as something to be manipulated and marketed to, at their pleasure and profit. Not something that could have consequences; not something that could potentially get them landed with a lawsuit. The underestimation of non-Anglophone fandoms is particularly rampant, and I can see clearly where the moral injury comes into play for those fans rising to Olivares’ call to pre-ruin the reputation The Ministry of Time.
At the end of the day, the publisher and production company are able to ignore the online furor, and meanwhile keep on promoting the book and show to the English-speaking audience that it is their job to entertain.
But Kaliane doesn’t get to ignore it. It’s coming down right on her head, spoiling the launch of what is sure to be a massive and celebrated career. At this point there’s nothing she can do or say to convince the righteously angry audience of El ministerio del tiempo that she has never watched it. It’s brutally unfair, and it’s not lost on me that this could’ve all been avoided if they’d just given the damn thing a slightly different name.