Article Excerpt:
A full 17 years after its initial publication, Three Body Problem mania has swept China and soon, probably, the world, with animated, television, and upcoming film adaptations of the story being hot topics in that country’s popular culture landscape, with sequel books suggesting plenty more grist for the mill in the years to come. The introspective sci-fi story deals with Professor Wang Miao, an applied physicist working in nano-materials who starts seeing subtle things that defy scientific logic and reality. The trouble with believing in science as an immutable understanding of the universe is that life and knowledge seem meaningless if those rules turn out to be fake. That’s why so many scientists in Three Body Problem seem to be killing themselves, having faced similar revelations.
The most significant and popular adaptation so far is the recently finished Tencent version, Three-Body, available in full for all 30 episodes on Rakuten Viki, and still being rolled out slowly for free on Tencent’s YouTube channel. The Netflix version due out this year will likely inevitably eclipse it, simply because no English mainstream media has really acknowledged that Three-Body exists at all. Whatever Netflix does, Tencent has staked out its position as an extremely faithful adaptation, for better or worse. There’s a reason it’s so long.
Mostly that’s because of Chinese TV production standards than anything else. Unlike in other countries, television dramas in China typically roll out without specific episode runs. Similar to how people shoot most documentary television, the priority is to get a large amount of footage, using editing to single out the best, most relevant material. Because Three-Body has been such a hotly anticipated project for so long, though, they approved it for an unusually long 30-episode run. So the script, which included nearly everything from the book under the assumption that some of it would be cut…wasn’t cut. This makes for an extremely complete adaptation, even if the monotony on-screen plays out quite differently than it does on page.
This also calls to mind a fairly striking irony. While Liu Cixin first serialized Three Body Problem between 2006 and 2008, and these are also the years where he sets the story, publishers didn’t translate the books into English until 2014. Then the 2015 Hugo Awards controversy probably led to Three Body Problem getting far more attention than it likely would have received otherwise. Ironically, though, Three Body Problem is exactly the kind of hard science fiction the Hugo Awards detractors were complaining don’t get enough attention in contemporary science fiction, with excessively pedantic scientific explanations and theoretical physics forming the core of the story’s prose.