My favorite quote about science fiction comes from longtime editor Frederik Pohl, who paraphrased Isaac Asimov when he wrote, “Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
In other words, it’s not the piece of technology or scientific advance itself that matters in spinning a sci-fi yarn, but rather the advance’s ramifications for humanity. Anyone can predict that humanity might one day, say, make first contact with aliens. But under what circumstances? And what might that contact say about our place in the universe? And what would those events mean for successive generations?
In the Three-Body Problem trilogy, Chinese author Liu Cixin constructs the most magnificently intricate, wildly ambitious traffic jam ever imagined. After the series’ first book was translated into English in 2014, Liu became the first Asian winner of the annual Hugo Award for best science-fiction or fantasy novel. His work received praise from the likes of Barack Obama and George R.R. Martin. It was so influential that it even coined a name for an actual scientific theory. (Don’t Google “the dark forest,” the title of the series’ second book, or else you will encounter massive spoilers.)
And now former Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with True Blood’s Alexander Woo, have brought that impeccable cosmic traffic jam to Netflix, in what The New York Times called the “apotheosis of the nerd-tech takeover of our storytelling culture.” All eight episodes of the adaptation’s first season will be released on Thursday, with the streamer hoping to rival the book series’ smash success.
3 Body Problem (as the show’s title is stylized) is a proper fit for Benioff and Weiss, even though one of their adaptive sagas takes place in a medieval fantasy world and the other is in modern and futuristic sci-fi settings. 3 Body Problem is sexless, but in tone, it’s sci-fi’s answer to Thrones’ grimdark sensibilities: In his essay anthology A View From the Stars, which reaches shelves next month, Liu writes that this series was his attempt to “try and imagine the worst universe possible” and that the second book’s title is fitting because “my universe is unbelievably dark.”
His story exploring this “worst universe possible” is the hardest of hard science fiction, with long passages about orbital mechanics, quantum physics, solar radiation, and the speed of light. Both the books and show open with a dual-timeline story. In one timeline, set in China during the Cultural Revolution, a traumatized young woman finds a home at a mysterious military base; in the other, modern-day law enforcement officers investigate a string of scientist suicides while other characters are invited to play a state-of-the-art virtual reality game.
Such a hard sci-fi story would seem “unadaptable”—but Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series was viewed the same way, once upon a time, before evolving into a creative and cultural darling, a show that simultaneously set records for both Emmy Awards and HBO viewership. Crucially, while Thrones faltered at the finish line as it outran its still-incomplete source material, 3 Body Problem won’t face the same challenge, as the ending to Liu’s book series is already written. That difference gives Benioff and Weiss the opportunity to do what they do best: adapt an unadaptable genre story for the masses.
They have a “knack … for making what seems like completely inaccessible material totally accessible,” actor John Bradley, who played Samwell Tarly in Thrones and features as a snack-food tycoon in 3 Body, said in a press packet provided by Netflix. “I just couldn’t see how they were going to do it, but then as I started to read the scripts, I realized what a magic touch they’ve got in terms of taking this very dense source material and making it into an entertaining mainstream show.”
Bradley’s right. I’ve seen screeners for the entire season, and I was astonished by its quality; 3 Body Problem holds mostly true to the spirit of the source text, preserving its strengths while also shoring up its weaknesses. The book series is remarkable. The Netflix show might be an even better version of the story.
When I first discovered Liu’s trilogy and tore through all three books, their plots and themes dominated my waking thoughts and dreams for months afterward. I have since read everything Liu has ever written that’s been translated into English. When I joined an online baseball simulation league—my sci-fi fandom is not my only über-nerdy interest—I named my team the Trisolaris Droplets. (If you know, you know.) My wife’s gift to me for our first wedding anniversary (traditionally associated with a “paper” theme) was a gorgeous art book inspired by the series.
I offer all these anecdotes to establish my bona fides as a massive fan of the trilogy, so you’ll know I’m speaking in good faith when I admit that it’s also weighed down by several major flaws. The books’ timelines can grow confusing, especially when Liu doubles back to previous events and shares confusing flashbacks. His treatment of romantic subplots—and of some gender dynamics more broadly—is uncomfortable. His characters, most of all, tend to exist as two-dimensional vehicles for ideas rather than as 3D flesh-and-blood creations.
Fictional stories can draw readers in because of beautiful prose or compelling characters or a riveting plot; rare success stories, like Martin’s ASoIaF, combine all three. But Liu thrives through plot alone. He devotes far more attention to building his ideas and worlds than to building his characters. (This is especially true of a main character in the first book, whom a coworker—who didn’t enjoy her reading experience—called “the most boring man in the world.”)
This imbalance is partly a matter of cultural exchange. In a New Yorker profile of Liu, Chinese American writer Jiayang Fan wrote of China’s development over the course of Liu’s life, “The scale and the speed of China’s economic transformation were conducive to a fictive mode that concerns itself with the fate of whole societies, planets, and galaxies, and in which individuals are presented as cogs in larger systems.”
Yet the lack of individually compelling characters is also a choice (or a limitation) of Liu’s. He’s a power plant engineer by trade, not a trained writer. As he told Fan for that profile, “I did not begin writing for love of literature. I did so for love of science.”
That inversion wouldn’t work on television, which is, at its heart, a medium driven by character and dialogue. “I started as a playwright, so that’s the only way I know how to write: character first,” Woo said via Netflix. “For a television series, that’s the thing that gives you an emotional attachment to the story and makes you think about it after the credits roll.”
Part of the creators’ adaptive solution was structural. In Liu’s trilogy, the sequels’ protagonists don’t appear in the first book, and the various main characters don’t know each other before the events of the series.
So Benioff, Weiss, and Woo decided to pull those later protagonists (under different names) to the start of the first season of TV. They also connected those characters in a manner that might be less realistic—is it actually likely that the most important characters in a world-spanning story would have been friends before the crisis began?—but makes for a more cohesive viewing experience. Audiences love an ensemble.
“What you gain by making these changes is a greater level of emotional engagement, which is at the heart of any TV show,” Woo said.
In the case of 3 Body, that ensemble consists of five characters whose friendship dates back to their days as physics students at Oxford. The members of the quintet have since branched out into different scientific subfields: Jin (Jess Hong) is a theoretical physicist, Saul (Jovan Adepo) works in a lab, Auggie (Eiza González) applies her education to a job constructing nanomaterials, Jack (Bradley) owns a popular snack-food company, and Will (Alex Sharp) is a schoolteacher.
Those characters offer not only more emotional engagement than their book counterparts, but also a greater variety in tone. Jack, for instance, adds welcome humor and sarcasm to an otherwise overly serious show. (Benedict Wong’s Da Shi, an intelligence officer, supplies his fair share of levity, too.)
Altering character presentation is a common tactic for hard sci-fi shows that move from the page to the screen. The Foundation adaptation on Apple TV+ took a similar approach to its ostensibly unfilmable source material, another dense sci-fi story that emphasizes world-building over character-building. As Asimov’s story skips across time, most characters appear for no more than a few chapters. (Incidentally, Liu directly references Foundation in the second book in his series.)
The Foundation adaptation introduces cloning and cryogenic procedures to extend its characters’ life spans—and keep its high-profile actors on-screen. “I think the secret sauce for adapting Foundation was really rooting it in emotion,” showrunner David S. Goyer said in 2021. “Really rooting it in character.”
Elsewhere in the realm of hard sci-fi adaptations, Dune: Part Two condensed its time frame and cut out the book’s precocious toddler, which would have been trickier to depict on-screen. The Expanse TV show also fiddled with character timelines, including introducing a fan favorite who doesn’t appear until the second book in the pilot episode. His Dark Materials is more fantasy than sci-fi, but HBO’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy employed the same solution in transporting a character who debuts in the second book to the show’s second episode.
The Expanse adaptation also added more dialogue and banter in place of a detective character’s mostly internal narration. Daniel Abraham, one of the coauthors and executive producers of the series, told me this change was necessary because “watching the guy sit at home and drink whiskey and think—not great television.”
The same rationale shapes the 3 Body adaptation. Where in the book one character plays the virtual reality game alone and must think through its problems by himself, the show engages multiple characters in the VR world so that they can collaborate and share their thoughts with both one another and the audience.
One other major change in the 3 Body cast, versus its book equivalent, stems from the globalization of a story that originally transpired almost entirely in China. (The sequels spend more time globe-trotting and even traveling beyond our pale blue dot.) While the first season’s two largest roles went to actors of Chinese descent, other Chinese characters from the book are, in the show, played by white, Black, Pakistani, and Mexican actors. And while flashbacks are still centered in China, much of the present-day action shifts to London instead.
According to the creators, Liu gave them his blessing to swap characters’ races and genders, and the cast and creators have stressed repeatedly that these changes were intended to tell a better global story, not to whitewash an inherently Chinese tale.
“We wanted to represent, as much as possible, all of humanity,” Benioff said, per Netflix. “We wanted people from all over the world. We tried to make this a very diverse, international cast to represent the idea that this isn’t just one country’s struggle against the threat of aliens; it’s a global struggle to survive.”
Some viewers may rebel against these changes, but cast members quoted in Netflix’s press materials applauded the resulting opportunities for greater representation. Switching a scientist character from a Chinese man to a Latina woman, said González, “allowed me to be a bit more subversive in this take on a scientist. I feel like we have a very specific idea when it comes to doctors or scientists that’s very sterile and clean-cut. Being a woman from Latin America, I really wanted to create a role that reflected a Latin American woman in a different, more beautiful light.”
Not all of 3 Body’s adaptive changes can compensate for the source material’s relative weaknesses. To return to the Thrones comparison, none of 3 Body’s characters are as rich or complex as Tyrion Lannister, Arya Stark, or many of Martin’s other creations. Nor does 3 Body’s dialogue crackle like Thrones’ at its best.
But elements of production design—such as props, costumes, effects, and score—unique to the screen elevate other aspects beyond the capabilities of plain words on a page.
“The thing that’s amazing about filmed entertainment,” The Expanse’s Abraham said, “is it has a musical score, and there’s this whole layer of emotional evocation that you just get for free. It’s amazing. It’s a powerful tool. If you could do that in a book, it would be astounding.”
In addition to reconvening Thrones actors like Bradley, Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth), and Jonathan Pryce (the High Sparrow), 3 Body calls on many of the below-the-line standouts who shaped Thrones’ look, sound, and feel, including composer Ramin Djawadi, who’s back with a delightful soundtrack for the new show. Thrones and 3 Body visual effects producer Steve Kullback said via Netflix that “the level of complexity of the visual effects is similar, in many ways, to some of the things we did on Game of Thrones.”
This series looks expensive, and it feels all the more immersive for its attention to portraying an entire world. 3 Body expands even beyond Thrones’ great sprawl, leaping, in the VR world, from ancient China to Tudor England to 13th-century Mongolia to 16th-century Italy and, in the real world, from England to Panama to Switzerland to Florida.
The effects work carries over to the show’s infrequent action scenes. A midseason sequence on an oil tanker, which transforms a one-page event into a jaw-dropping visual spectacle, is one of the best set pieces Benioff and Weiss have ever produced. It’s not quite Hardhome or the Red Wedding, but it’s not far behind. (3 Body’s actual version of the Red Wedding would come in Season 2, if the show is renewed.)
This action is played up in part because, as my colleague Justin Charity wrote, both the books and show are “sci-fi thrillers, but the books put the emphasis on sci-fi where the show puts the emphasis on thriller.” This streamlining mostly works. The most confusing part of the first book—and, in my opinion, the entire series—unfolds over 25 dense pages, as Liu details the construction of a new piece of advanced technology that makes use of extra dimensions. On the screen, however, 3 Body condenses this sequence via a quick summary before moving on—again, focusing more on the traffic jam than the automobile itself.
Still, cutting down on the science nerdery in the interest of broader viewer comprehension means that, for some fans, the books’ appeal will be lost in translation. I couldn’t help but wish that other missing parts had been included in the adaptation: a scene that uses a billiard table as a metaphor for a particle accelerator; Liu’s deeper exploration of the VR game, which allows the reader to try to untangle its collection of mysteries along with the characters instead of just watching them solve it; more details about the ingenious “human computer” in VR, which looks cool but isn’t really explained on-screen.
For viewers who want more sci-fi in their sci-fi thriller, or frankly more sci in their sci-fi, a competing Chinese-language adaptation aired in 2023 and is now streaming on Peacock. This version of the story, produced by the Chinese conglomerate Tencent, is almost unflinchingly faithful to the book, as it stretches over 30 episodes and thus has much more room to delve into all of the novel’s scientific minutiae. Tencent’s series is not entirely faithful, however: It elides the integral aspects of Chinese history that influence characters and catalyze the plot.
When drafting his book, Liu front-loaded scenes showing the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, but as a New York Times piece explained, his “Chinese publisher worried that the opening scenes were too politically charged and would never make it past government censors, so they were placed later in the narrative, he says, to make them less conspicuous. Liu reluctantly agreed to the change, but felt the novel was diminished.” Now, Liu recommends that bilingual readers choose the English translation of his book—which returned those chapters to the front of the novel—instead of the Chinese version.
The same dynamic apparently played out in the dueling adaptations. The Tencent adaptation downplays these scenes, while the Netflix show—just like the English translation of the book—opens with them, as a physics professor faces opprobrium from a mob because of his beliefs about science and religion.
Liu himself is an atheist, but he still believes it’s his role to inspire a spiritual response in his readers. In one of his essays in A View From the Stars, he writes, “The religious feeling of science fiction is a deep sense of awe at the great mysteries of the universe.”
The show captures that same sense of wonder and reflects it back to the audience from the start. At the end of the first episode, when the stars in the night sky behave in an unusual way, the hair on my arms stood up, just as it had when I discovered the great mysteries in the book.
“We want to do justice to the books and create a show that makes people feel the way the books made us feel,” Benioff said. “And the best way to do that is not to just schematically take things from the book and put them on-screen in the order and manner in which they appear in the books.”
Those more holistic changes alter character and story structure but not Liu’s propulsive plot or, most of all, the way his books made so many readers feel. With the aid of TV-friendly tweaks and Netflix’s massive reach, the 3 Body adaptation has the opportunity to fill even more audience members with that deep sense of awe.
“A lot of people who said, ‘I don’t like fantasy’ became big fans of Game of Thrones,” Benioff added. “And our hope is that we’ll get a lot of people who normally are not into science fiction to love 3 Body Problem.”