It was probably about ten years ago when I read Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem. It was a slow burn - I didn't love the book at first, and it was confusing while reading, as what comes later helps the reader to understand aspects which initially make no sense. This weekend, I binged Netflix new adaptation: Three Body Problem, and I loved it.
The ten episode series adapts the book and makes it even better. I'll be honest - I've forgotten quite a lot of what I read in the book roughly a decade back, but the few parts which I did remember were brought to the screen in a way I hadn't realized would be doable.
The book takes place largely in China, which makes complete sense given that it was written by a Chinese author. But given that the trilogy covers centuries of time and that the real protagonist of the series is the human race rather and any individual characters, the Netflix series's choice to globalize the protagonists makes sense.
The series's first scene is of a “struggle session” during China's cultural revolution. Apparently, in China, portrayal of this history is controversial, and the scene has been removed from the book. This is why the author has recommended the English translation, which retains the scene. In the Netflix series, China's cultural revolution is only one of three stories from three timelines being told. The others are of police investigating an odd rash of suicides amongst notable scientists, and of people being invited to play a secret virtual reality video game which has technology far too futuristic to have been created by any existing company.
Netflix's Three Body Problem is run by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are best known for Game of Thrones. They've brought with them Liam Cunningham, who played Davos Seaworth in Game of Thrones, and John Bradley who had played Samwell Tarly. Benedict Wong plays a chain-smoking police officer who'd been far more of a jerk in the book.
I've seen the series called “hard sci-fi”, which can be hard to believe when you see some of the things in the earlier bits of the show, but when you understand what's going on, it completely makes sense. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
One of the only scenes I did recall well, which happened very quickly in the book, turns into a huge and somewhat horrifying mid-series set piece in the Netflix adaptation. It follows the science perfectly, and that realism is part of what makes it horrifying to me.
Riding this The Three Body Problem high, I now want to go back and watch the Chinese language adaptation which came out a few months ago. I'd started watching it, but since it's all subtitled, I had trouble following while I was painting miniatures, and so never got past the first episode. I'll have to make some time and go back to it.