The next The Crown or The Queen’s Gambit? Netflix’s Chinese sci-fi series The Three-Body Problem is sparking hype – and controversy – already
Game of Thrones’ creators are on its production team and Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and George R.R. Martin have all praised the source material – here’s what to expect from Netflix’s much-hyped adaptation of author Liu Cixin’s history-making science fiction novel
So what’s next? One of Netflix’s biggest shows for the future is an adaptation of Chinese sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem. Never heard of it? Here’s what you need to know.
The original novel was a history-making award winner all over the globe
Written by Chinese author Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem was originally serialised in 2006 and won the Chinese Science Fiction Yinhe Award that same year. It was collected as a book two years later – the first entry in a trilogy, The Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
It wasn’t until 2014 that an English translation of the novel arrived, but it made a huge impact when it did. The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo Award for best novel, becoming the first-ever Asian novel to win one of science fiction’s top prizes, and was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. The novel’s success wasn’t limited to English and Chinese, either. Similarly prestigious awards followed when translations into German and Spanish were released in 2016.
The series is about mankind’s first contact with an alien race
On the surface, The Three-Body Problem’s plot sounds like standard stuff. At its most basic it tells a story of mankind encountering an alien race that’s set to invade Earth centuries in the future after it travels light years across space.
What has appealed to Western readers is a focus on “hard science fiction” concepts like curvature propulsion (a method of light speed travel that involves reducing the speed of light to “drag a ship through space”) and sophons (eleven-dimensional protons) as well as the author’s non-Western perspective on the sci-fi genre.
The New Yorker noted that “for an American reader, one of the pleasures of reading Liu is that his stories draw on entirely different resources,” referencing the aspects of Chinese history, culture and politics that form the centre of The Three-Body Problem.
