Please forgive my obsession with Cixin Liu’s Sci-Fi classic “Three Body Problem”.
For anyone interested, it is worth noticing that Chinese streaming platform Tencent has produced a 29-episode live action version of the book. The first episode (link below, English subtitles) looks rather promising, although it may make more sense to people who have read the book. And we have to remember that Chinese TV style is more like Mexican telenovelas – slower paced than the typical Western production.
Thank you for sharing! I will save this for future viewing, along with the animated series you posted. I have not yet read the book, but it will be at the top of my reading list once I finish Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
Yay. I’m only part of the way through the history of Chinese Communist Party:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMc1KlemyBkwA6Pg8Pdfj9EL-FMJXcFNX
It’s a nicely done show, showing the founder dynamics, but in a political context.
Just another update – now having watched up to Episode 11 of the TenCent series. Probably fair to say that the video version is faithful to the spirit of the book, with some plot modifications to make it fit better with the visual medium.
By Episode 11, the plot has reached back to the Mao era, and the abuse & suffering imposed on the young woman that later led her to send out the distress call to the Universe which drew the attention of the aliens. Emotionally very powerful. Interesting that China will broadcast something which is not at all complimentary to the earlier days of the Chinese Communist Party.
Definitely worth watching!
Well, I have finished watching the “Three Body” series on YouTube, complete with cute Chinese adverts. 29 episodes, taking a total of about 22 hours viewing time. Then I was sufficiently stimulated to re-read the book, taking about 4+ hours.
Really just as a side comment, something I have felt for a while is that video means of communication are rather inefficient compared to reading a written text. In this case, it looks like video communication takes about 5 times longer than reading. On the other hand, the visualizations (with appropriate use of Computer Graphic Images) do add substantially to the telling.
This video series may be an unusual example, because the video is so faithful to the book – the ~390 page long “The Three-Body Problem” first volume of Cixin Liu’s Sci-Fi trilogy. That is very different from, say, the movie adaptations of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit”, where the movie-makers took great liberties with the author’s text.
In contrast, much of the dialog in “Three Body” is taken directly from the book, along with almost every scene. About the only obvious omissions are scenes where the key figure in the story sees her physicist father beaten to death by four young female Red Guards and where she meets those no-longer young women again about a dozen years later. For reasons which are understandable in a series made in China, those incidents are covered in the video by references in discussion rather than by visualizations.
Since the book & video series cover the life of that key figure over the half-century from the Mao era in the 1960s up to about 2010, her role had to be played by two actresses, for her younger life and her later life. Both actresses are very good, as are most of the other players. Apparently, this series took about 3 years to film – and it is easy to see why, given the wide range of settings.
I am hardly an unbiased reviewer of Cixin Liu’s work – but if you happen to have 22 hours to spare, this video series is well worth your time.
The British Library organized an interview with author Liu Cixin by English academic Jim Al-Khalili. I cannot really recommend taking an hour to look at the interview because, although Prof. Al-Khalili is a prominent BBC broadcaster on matters scientific, he seemed peculiarly unprepared for this interview.
However, there was one fascinating snippet in the discussion. As most are aware, the driver for the plot of Mr. Liu’s “Three Body Problem” was the trauma experienced by a young woman during China’s Cultural Revolution when she witnessed her professor father being beaten to death by four teenage female Red Guards for the crime of failing to teach Marxist physics.
Author Liu originally intended that the Cultural Revolution and the Cold War would figure much more prominently in his novel. However, in discussions with his primary target audience of younger Chinese who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, he found that they simply had no interest in the events of those times.
Maybe this is symptomatic of a world in which we humans mostly have a very short attention span? Look at how the ongoing wars in Gaza and the Ukraine have largely dropped off the news, and everyone has forgotten about the debacle in Afghanistan. Things that happened before we were born might as well be ancient history.
And contrast that with us, for whom even WWII is interesting though we didn’t participate and may not even have been born. Seems to me the later generations just aren’t interested in any history - which goes a long way towards explaining “wokeness”.
Netflix in the US recently launched the Three Body Problem, which is ten episode season.
From the looks of it, the episodes deviate quite a bit from the story line in the book, though it keeps some of the elements, including the Cultural Revolution scenes.
I have seen some of the trailers and hype about the Netflix series. It looks like Netflix decided to cut up the trilogy a lot, compress it, wokify it to the max, and then cut costs by making it cheaply in England – and it shows.
In his interview, author Liu said he had little involvement in the film versions of his works. He was delighted with the Chinese TV series of the first book, which stuck very closely to the original. On the other hand China made a high-grossing movie of one of his short stories (“The Wandering Earth”) that bore very little resemblance to his tale. Maybe an author just has to grit his teeth and cash the check?
Crazy story of the week:
The tragic incident surrounding the Netflix adaptation of the “Three Body Problem” series is not widely known among its fans. Lin Qi, a visionary and brilliant young billionaire, acquired the rights to the “Three Body Problem” with the ambition of creating various products from it. He enlisted the expertise of Xu Yao, a distinguished lawyer, appointing him CEO to spearhead the business operations, including securing a deal with Netflix—a feat for which Lin compensated Xu with a salary of nearly $3 million. However, Xu’s performance did not meet expectations beyond the Netflix agreement, leading Lin to reduce his salary to $750,000 and bring in additional executives to enhance business operations. Xu, retaining his CEO title, was reportedly infuriated by this demotion and further aggravated by not being credited as a producer on the Netflix project.
Driven by revenge and inspired by the TV show “Breaking Bad,” Xu meticulously planned Lin’s murder. He purchased 160 phones and established a company in Japan to acquire the necessary chemicals for his scheme, testing them on animals. Xu then poisoned Lin and his colleagues, disguising the lethal substances as an advanced probiotic. Lin unsuspectingly consumed it and soon after was hospitalized, where it was immediately apparent he had been poisoned, though the specific toxins were unknown. The police quickly suspected Xu, who, had he disclosed the nature of the poisons (later found to have included exotic substances such as pufferfish poison and mercury and at least three other poisons), could have saved Lin’s life. However, he chose not to, ensuring Lin’s demise. Just a few days ago, as the show was premiering globally, Xu was finally sentenced to death for the murder of Lin and attempted murder of two other colleagues, who survived but with lifelong injuries.
Lin Qi, credited as an executive producer on the Netflix project posthumously, passed away at the age of 39. RIP
That tale might have made a better TV show than the Netflix adaptation of the book!
In fact, the story is so good one has to wonder if it is real. 
Why 160 phones? Is that machine translation gone wrong?
It only supports the maxim: “Never give what you may have to reclaim”. The resulting sense of unfairness and disappointment may be so strong that the recipient might go out of his way for revenge. Somewhat similar to:
