You may have recently heard a minor commotion around this new Netflix show called 3 Body Problem. The deal here is that the dudes who made Game of Thrones made a new series based on an inexplicably bonkers and popular trilogy of Chinese science-fiction novels, and the first book’s climax features a nefarious alien civilization that is preparing to invade Earth by unfolding a proton into 11 dimensions. This is terrible news for Earth, obviously. It takes 20 pages for the nefarious proton unfolding to occur; the flustered aliens spend most of that time trying to unfold the goddamn proton into just two dimensions. (The aliens almost accidentally unfold the proton into zero dimensions, which would be terrible for them, apparently.)
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Right away, let me say this to literally any question you can think of: Forget it. Do not ask me to explain anything here—the proton-unfolding part or the “inexplicably bonkers and popular” part. None of it really makes sense; I’m just rolling with it, and so should you. The Game of Thrones guys are (probably) gonna unfold a proton into 11 dimensions on TV. That’s the pitch. And even if there were already dozens of TV shows featuring aliens unfolding protons into 11 dimensions, I can personally guarantee that this show’s gonna be the best one.
Let me quickly give you my credentials, or my lack thereof: I am not quite a sci-fi novice, but I’m also far from an expert. I’ve read the first three books in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series but haven’t gotten to the Apple TV+ series yet, and I watched all six seasons of the rad Syfy/Amazon series The Expanse and bought the first book, but I haven’t read it yet. Here’s what I know for sure: The Three-Body Problem, first published in 2008 by Liu Cixin, a Niangziguan power plant worker turned international sci-fi superstar, is one of my favorite novels of the past 20 years. It’s dense and dazzling and goofy and baffling and truly wondrous in both the “Space is awesome” sense and the “Yo, what the fuck are you talking about?” sense. Sometimes a cigar-chomping tough-guy cop nicknamed Da Shi is shooting it out with a cadre of nuclear-bomb-toting radicals, and sometimes things get a little more, uh, abstruse. Matter of fact, lemme just lay a brief passage of this book on you. This is all dialogue. They’re discussing a tobacco pipe. Good luck.
“The sponge or active charcoal inside a filter is three-dimensional. Their adsorbent surfaces, however, are two-dimensional. Thus, you can see how a tiny high-dimensional structure can contain a huge low-dimensional structure. But at the macroscopic level, this is about the limit of the ability for high-dimensional space to contain low-dimensional space. Because God was stingy, during the big bang He only provided the macroscopic world with three spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time. But this doesn’t mean that higher dimensions don’t exist. Up to seven additional dimensions are locked within the micro scale, or, more precisely, within the quantum realm. And added to the four dimensions at the macro scale, fundamental particles exist within an eleven-dimensional space-time.”
“So what?”
Yes. I love it. I love all of it. I love the endless, dense paragraphs of unapologetic hard sci-fi wonkery; I love the comic relief–adjacent So what? (that guy is also a scientist). Given the unapologetic denseness, it is likewise awesome (and baffling) that The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels—The Dark Forest (my favorite; nobody agrees with me) and Death’s End—have achieved such international renown: the English translations starting in 2014, the engrossing Liu Cixin New Yorker profile, the Barack Obama shout-out, and now, yes, the super-expensive TV series so determined to be the next Game of Thrones that it’s cocreated by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, a.k.a. the actual Game of Thrones guys. I bet nobody forgets about the Iron Fleet this time, even though this particular Iron Fleet is four light-years away.
A tobacco pipe, in fact, appears just a few minutes into the 3 Body Problem pilot, laid lovingly upon the dead body of a Chinese scientist who’s just been brutally beaten to death at a 1968 struggle session during the Cultural Revolution. That grim scene opens the English version of the book as well, albeit with just a wee bit less, uh, brutality, but that’s the Game of Thrones guys for you. Just like in the book, modern-day scientists are dying mysteriously. Not like in the book, one of those scientists has brutally cut his own eyes out. Just like in the book: lots of talk about particle accelerators. Not like in the book: myriad f-bombs (“Time is a motherfucker,” observes a nice old lady) and a little smooching. Just like in the book: a mysterious countdown, a mysterious virtual reality video game, and a mysterious late-’60s Chinese mountain base with a giant bird-killing radar antenna sitting on top of it. Not like in the book: John Bradley, formerly known as the noble Samwell Tarly from Game of Thrones, who plays a brash crisps impresario who says stuff like, “Suck a dick, Pringles,” a line that is, to repeat, not in the book. Just like in the book: Da Shi, the chain-smoking detective. Not like in the book: He’s played by Benedict Wong (love that guy) and says shit like, “Just be glad you’re not a scientist. Shit time to be a scientist.”
Love it. I love the first few episodes, anyway. (All eight episodes of the first season drop on Thursday; the finale is called “Wallfacer,” which is awesome news for everyone who prefers the second book of the trilogy, even if that is literally only me.) 3 Body Problem has a super-bombastic and only somewhat invasive musical score courtesy of—surprise!—Game of Thrones superstar composer Ramin Djawadi: At one point, my closed captions simply read, “[Music Builds to a Terrifying Crescendo],” which is both funny and accurate. The non-flashback action is now set in London, not China; the scene in which a drunk lady wails Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” in a karaoke bar is, you guessed it, not in the book. But the sense of both foreboding and wondrousness is familiar and delightful, and while the physics jargon is kept to a minimum, the physics jargon is, crucially, not omitted entirely. Though they are all disconcertingly hot, these scientists are all actual scientists, not, like, Bond movie scientists; you get the gist without hacky “Explain it to me like I’m a 3-year-old” exposition dumps.
And so, in 3 Body Problem’s second episode, a lattice of nanofibers slices through a diamond: “The world’s finest nanofiber, 3,000 times finer than human hair, invisible as air, as strong as steel, all that shit.” Other topics include the Fermi paradox, electromagnetic radiation from Jupiter, and the I Ching. There is a Rolling Stones needle drop out of precisely fucking nowhere. And I laughed out loud twice, once because the show wanted me to (John Bradley, formerly known as Samwell Tarly, a.k.a. the Crisps Guy, is very funny) and once because this show is occasionally just like Game of Thrones in one crucial respect (copious, unnecessary nudity). I wish I hadn’t watched that particular scene in a Starbucks, but ah well. I love these books, and it appears this show understands why: the dead seriousness but also the absurdity, the abstruseness but also the silliness, the hardcore science but also the prestige-TV-ain’t-dead-yet art. Let the proton unfold. The nefarious aliens will figure out how to do it eventually.
