News culture The 3-Body Problem: SF and Netflix can thank this emblematic novel by Liu Cixin

Culture news The 3-Body Problem: SF and Netflix can thank this iconic novel by Liu Cixin

The 3-Body Problem, a pillar of Chinese SF literature

David Benioff and DB Weiss, who can be found behind the series Game Of Thrones, move to science fiction and the Netflix side with The Three-Body Problem. Posted online on March 21 with eight episodes, the series was generally well received by Western audiences, but enthusiasm seemed moderate. In the series, a British government agent played by Benedict Wong (Doctor Strange) joins forces with a group of Oxford students to understand what surrounds a strange wave of suicide within the scientific community.

Quickly, they all discover together that everything seems linked to an interactive virtual reality experience addressing a fundamental physics problem. This one is linked, for its part, to a Chinese scientist who worked in the 1960s and who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Set to music by Ramin Djawdi, the series The 3-Body Problem features, in addition to Benedict Wong: Liam Cunningham, Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonzales, John Bradley-West, Alex Sharp, Rosalind Chao, Jonathan Price and even Mario Kelly.

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All these beautiful people have the heavy task of giving life to this adaptation of three novels entitled The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest and The Immortal Death. A true worldwide success, this trilogy and its author Liu Cixin bring many subjects to the table, as we learned during an interview with The Guardian. Nic Cheetam, publishing director at the editor Head of Zeus, explains that he was absolutely unaware of the importance of the author and his work in China:

When we arrived at the store, there were literally hundreds of people waiting for the signature, most of them Chinese students. Liu had a film crew with him, who were filming him for a documentary on Chinese television. It was only then that we realized how big he was in China. He’s a rock star over there.

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Cultural Revolution and Jules Verne: the origins of the bestseller

For his part, the author wanted to have his novels translated so that the Western world discovers that there is also science fiction in China, and that it is interesting. However, he himself admits not having anticipated the success of The 3-Body Problem, which sold more than three million copies in the world.

In fact, it is the literary work which best exported outside of China, just that. Whether it’s true or to forge his own legend, Liu Cixin explains that he discovered science fiction while reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. A special discovery because at the time, foreign works were mostly prohibited. The book was hidden in a box belonging to the father of Liu, while the family lived in a mining town in Shanxi province.

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The opening of the country in the late 1970s allowed many works to be translated into Chinese, and in the early 2000s, Liu Cinxi began to write. The adaptation of the 3-Body Problem was supervised by the author, delighted to offer his work to a much wider audience. However, the Chinese public who were able to see the series protested against certain choices made by the production. For example, in the original work, we witness the violent attack of a physics progressor by the Red Guards in a revolutionary context.

This sequence is there in the series, but at the very beginning. For Chinese viewers, this change aims to degrade the image of China. In addition to this criticism, others have pointed out the westernization of the story. If in Liu Cixin’s story, the action took place in China, the creators of the series chose to move it to the UK by making certain modifications such as the splitting of certain characters, their change of gender, name and even nationality.