If you’re well-versed in contemporary world science fiction, then Chinese author Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem — the first in his Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy — is likely already on your favorites list. In 2015, the English translation won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and helped sweep Chinese science fiction onto the modern global literary radar, with eight million copies of the trilogy sold worldwide.
Yet for mainstream Western audiences, the Remembrance of Earth's Past novels haven’t crossed over into the general pop culture zeitgeist. So when Netflix bought the rights for an English language streaming adaptation in 2019, finding writers who could distill the heady subject matter about astrophysics, extraterrestrials, and human extinction into an exciting series narrative, and make it alluring for global audiences was imperative.
In 2020, Netflix put together a trio of seasoned television writers who had already succeeded in turning sci-fi books into hugely popular series. Writing partners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (nicknamed D&D) were the sole showrunners of HBO’s Game of Thrones series based on author George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and Alexander Woo who was an executive producer on HBO’s True Blood based on Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels and creator of The Terror: Infamy. After reading Liu Cixin’s work, they were hooked and ready to go.
Watch this exclusive clip from 3 Body Problem featuring Benedict Wong:
Why the Books Work As a Series
“When you start reading it, there's some absolutely amazing things going on,” Weiss said of the narrative. “With a book that has that cover, you don't expect it to start that way. You expect it to start with Space Captain Brock Sampson, or whatever, and it doesn't. It starts in the world, as it was, in a terrible, real event. So, it automatically raises the question, how does this turn into a book that has that cover? Out of the gate, it pushed me through the book because there's a question that it planted in me and I needed to know the answer to that question.”
Woo said he was also deeply impressed with the “gear shifts” the author pulls on the reader. “It starts as historical fiction and then it's a murder mystery, then science fiction. It was really exhilarating. You're wrong-footed constantly, which is something that we wanted to certainly adapt the spirit of.”
The book opens following the tumultuous existence of Ye Wenjie, a Chinese astrophysicist. A survivor of the Cultural Revolution, she eventually becomes a trusted member of a secret Chinese program searching for extraterrestrial life, where she decodes a message from the Trisolarans. Their alien world is doomed and she invites them to Earth. Whom she tells, and what comes from their response, spans decades involving a broad ensemble of Chinese characters.
“I'm not really a science fiction guy. For the most part, I just don't care enough about the stories because I don't care about the characters,” Benioff admitted about his ennui about the genre. “So when I finished these books, the one thing that was incredible to me was where it starts.
“Right away, I was on that woman's side,” he said of Wenjie. “I don't know where she's gonna go, but I am rooting for her. And then there’s the ending, which is incredible and powerful and also very much about characters, and quite small. There's all the stuff in the middle that's science and really heavy stuff. But it starts and ends with characters and our connection to these characters. So that was everything for me, and I think for all of us.”
What to Keep and What to Change?
The trio started work in February 2020, and then due to the pandemic spent the next two years separate, virtually writing their adaptation, 3 Body Problem. Their mandate was to reconfigure the books as needed to make the story work in a visual medium but to stay character-focused.
To do that, they would diversify the book’s ensemble of characters to include more ethnicities and countries of origin for its five contemporary scientists—played by Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza González, John Bradley, and Alex Sharp—whom they dubbed “The Oxford Five”. But Ye Wenjie’s (Zine Tseng) story would remain very close to the book’s arc, and carry through as a central throughline in the series adaptation.
“It was important for us to start with the Cultural Revolution and then go into the mystery aspects of the story,” Woo explained. “That was something that we just loved from the novels.”
“For us, that had to be faithful,” Benioff confirmed. “But then we wanted to internationalize it and have people really representing humanity. And the other part of that is just like, how do we get these characters who might not intersect in the novel, get them to know each other? So we came up with this notion that most of [the Five] went to school together … and we bring them together in the first episode and you get to know these relationships.”
“And so even if the specific details are different, the one thing I think that's most important to adapt from the source material is just the spirit of it,” Woo continued. “It's [about], ‘What is that feeling that you get when you first read that book?’ And hopefully, it's the same feeling you get when you watch this show.”
“In general, our primary goal was to make as good a show as we could make,” Weiss concurred. “And sometimes with any adaptation, whether it's for television or for film, from any source material, that will inevitably involve diverging from the source material. We knew from the beginning that we needed to make this not just palatable, but exciting and thrilling and compelling to people who had never read these books. Hopefully, watching the show will draw people to the books…It's kind of a win-win scenario in that way, but the show needs to walk and talk on its own. It can't lean on the source material as a crutch, because it won't work for the vast majority of the people out there if it does.”
Benioff concluded, “The author has bequeathed us with this insanely ambitious, genius narrative, but we have to do work on the characters to make people care. Obviously, we want a big audience. It's an expensive show. We need a big audience to justify that to get further seasons. But a lot of it's just like, how can we make a show that we're going to love? Because I don't think I'm a unique person. I think if I love something, other people are going to feel the same.”
3 Body Problem premieres on Netflix on March 21. Read IGN’s review here.
