The ‘3 Body Problem’ Primer

This Thursday, Netflix premieres 3 Body Problem, its long-awaited adaptation of the hit Chinese book series known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The series is led by none other than David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, now a few years off the series finale of their previous mega-hit, Game of Thrones, along with a third showrunner, Alexander Woo.

There’s a fair amount of hype for this adaptation, and the source material is quite dense. So, luckily for you, we’ve got our very own spoiler-free primer ahead of the series premiere. Let’s dive in.

What’s the deal with these books?

A decade ago, The Three-Body Problem was a global literary sensation. It was an unusual take on the classic first-contact theme in science-fiction—an expansive and engrossing story about several generations of humanity contending with an eerie extraterrestrial threat to life on Earth.

The Three Body Problem, first published as a standalone book in 2008, was the first book in a hard sci-fi trilogy that had already been released in China before Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen got to work on translating the series into English. This trilogy is known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past and consists of The Three-Body Problem (published in English in 2014), The Dark Forest (2015), and Death’s End (2016), each book a bit longer and weirder than the last. The first book won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel and only then went on to become a bestseller in the U.S. The trilogy ultimately achieved a great deal of commercial success and critical acclaim in the West, with Barack Obama stanning the series in The New York Times at the peak of its hype. This was the biggest hard sci-fi breakthrough in literature since Andy Weir’s The Martian, published a few years earlier.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past was also pretty remarkable for its peak popularity coinciding with the ascent of China as a cultural and geopolitical rival to the U.S. The series author Cixin Liu was raised in the Shanxi province in North China in the 1960s, amid the Cultural Revolution, with the Cultural Revolution itself being an important historical backdrop in the first book (more on this later). Before he was an acclaimed sci-fi author, Liu was a computer engineer, working at a power plant in Shanxi for several decades. He often cites Leo Tolstoy and Stanley Kubrick as major influences in his writing.

How did the Game of Thrones guys get involved in this TV adaptation?

There was at one point a huge scramble among the major streaming platforms to adapt Remembrance of Earth’s Past in some form or fashion. This despite the book trilogy often being described as “unadaptable,” given its many exceedingly wonky sci-fi concepts, its vastly bureaucratic intrigue, and its multi-generational narrative scope. But the books also have some spectacular sci-fi set pieces, which obviously lend themselves to big-budget production. Amazon was reportedly prepared to spend $1 billion to acquire the rights and produce several seasons of an adaptation—in an effort to make its own Game of Thrones, funny enough—but ultimately Netflix struck a deal with the Chinese holding company, Yoozoo Group, and tapped David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who additionally recruited Alexander Woo, to direct a TV adaptation.

Notably, this is the second adaptation of the series for television. Last year, Tencent produced its own live-action adaptation, titled Three-Body, with a Chinese cast and international subtitles. Three-Body was pretty well-reviewed but rather limited in its exposure to North America, since it launched on a relatively obscure platform, Rakuten Viki. NBC and Amazon only recently acquired rights to stream the series on Peacock and Prime Video, respectively.

What does the title even mean?

The three-body problem is a long-standing problem in astrophysics.

Consider the Moon, the Earth, and the Sun. The Moon revolves around the Earth, and the Earth revolves around the Sun. But the Moon isn’t simply hitching a ride with the Earth, it’s also revolving around the Sun in its own way. And while the Sun is much larger than the Moon, the Moon is still pretty massive, and so it exerts some gravitational influence of its own on the Earth. The interaction of these three bodies is a bit more complex and chaotic than: x revolves around y, which revolves around z.

Now imagine the problem in generic terms. Consider three celestial bodies of comparable mass—say, three stars—in intertwined orbit. Who’s orbiting who? What’s the pattern? Is there a pattern? How often does it repeat? Does it repeat? What, if anything, can you accurately predict about the movement of these three bodies? These are pressing questions posed to key characters in the first book.

What is this series even about?

It’s surprisingly hard to answer this basic question without spoiling bits of the first book. It is, in the vaguest terms that I can manage, about a bunch of scientists, engineers, philosophers, and politicians responding to a series of extraterrestrial provocations. But the conflict in this series isn’t as abrupt or straightforward as the alien invasions in War of the Worlds or Independence Day; Remembrance of Earth’s Past takes a much longer and much more technical view of the conflict. Accordingly, these books are heavy on dimensional physics, quantum mechanics, string theory, computer science, and game theory. They’re also quite thoughtful about human history and human nature.

This brings us to the historical and political aspects that often lead readers to describe these books as “very Chinese.” The first book opens with an extensive depiction of a violent struggle session in Beijing in the late 1960s, and sure enough, this is also the opening scene of the show. The massive popularity of these books in China, and the Chinese government’s eagerness to promote them, often surprises Western readers given Liu’s unsparing depiction of Maoism. This is a complex subject, but basically: modern Chinese leaders take a dim view of the Cultural Revolution, so criticism of this period isn’t as verboten as one might expect. Furthermore, the later books include some critical depictions of social and political ideals more associated with the West, so there’s indeed some culture clash in the series between geopolitical perspectives.

So, a hard sci-fi relitigation of post-war communism. Sounds complicated. How true is the adaptation to the books?

Benioff, Weiss, and Woo have actually taken a lot of liberties with the source material. The result—for better or worse—is an adaptation with a very different vibe than the books.

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Most conspicuously, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem rearranges the plot, such that late-stage developments in the first book instead happen as early as Episode 2 of the adaptation. The first season also overshoots the conclusion of the first book. The title of the eighth and final episode of the season, “Wallfacer,” is a concept introduced about a hundred pages into the second book, The Dark Forest. The show reveals the real conflict at the heart of The Three-Body Problem pretty quickly. The pressing question in the show is less “What are we dealing with?” and more so “How are we dealing with it?”

Also quite conspicuously, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem introduces a core group of characters who aren’t in the first book but all together map onto one character, the physicist Wang Miao, introduced in the first book, and another character, the astronomer Luo Ji, introduced in the second book. These new characters are a decidedly cosmopolitan bunch of 20-something drinking buddies from Oxford. They’re seemingly introduced for the sake of a general audience that isn’t necessarily into the more technical indulgences of hard science-fiction, and/or an audience that might struggle to connect with a cast of hardboiled Chinese antiheroes. “It’s been our directive to do a global show from the beginning,” Woo recently told The Hollywood Reporter, “and the Chinese-ness of the book’s philosophy is preserved in some of the characters.”

Also, I hate to use this term, but: the books are nerdy in a way that the show simply isn’t. Both are sci-fi thrillers, but the books put the emphasis on sci-fi where the show puts the emphasis on thriller. Both are intriguing in their own way, but again: different vibes.

That said, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem is an effective thriller. While the books were often described as “unadaptable” before Benioff, Weiss, and Woo got their hands on them, Netflix’s version if anything underscores Hollywood’s strengths. The show streamlines the presentation of a lot of concepts that are otherwise developed with reams of lecture notes in the books. It’s much easier to illustrate 10-dimensional constructs with a dynamic visual aid.

There are tradeoffs with this sort of streamlining, of course. Some of the wonkier concepts are actually illustrated rather beautifully in the books. I’m especially fond of the passages in The Three-Body Problem that are dedicated to explaining computer architecture in awesomely absurd terms, and I don’t think the show really does this bit justice. But then Benioff, Weiss, and Woo turn some other technobabble set pieces from the books into utterly spectacular television. Two words for those already in the know: nanomaterial monofilament.

What about the other two books? Is this thing getting another couple of seasons?

The early reviews have been pretty good, though with a few notable dissents, mostly concerning the creative liberties taken to make the source material supposedly more approachable. The first season finale will surely leave viewers wanting more. I can’t imagine Netflix wanting to cut this title or this particular creative team loose—what, with humanity’s fate hanging in the balance and whatnot. Benioff recently told Collider that he’d need “at least three, maybe four seasons to tell the whole story,” a modest ask given the plot in the books spanning millions of years.