“3 Body Problem”: Does Netflix have the new super series?

During the bloody unrest of China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, physicist Ye Wenjie was transferred to the secret research station ‘Red Shore’ as punishment. Their goal: to scan space for signs of alien life. Ye Wenjie actually receives a message – and sends a fatal response.

Strange things are happening in the present that portend gigantic upheavals: the stars in the universe wink and flash with lights, and scientists see a countdown appear before their eyes. Some take their own lives, others stop their fundamental research. And in a sophisticated virtual reality game, players must save an alien world from the deadly constellation of three suns.

Unlike the novel, the series is internationalized and is set not only in China and Inner Mongolia, but also in Oxford and London, among other places. The number of characters has grown and the cast is more female. “3 Body Problem” (“The Three Suns” in the German translation) is the first part of Cixin Liu’s “Trisolaris” trilogy. In English it has the unbeatable title “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”, based on Marcel Proust.

The simplest answer: because celebrities like Barack Obama or Mark Zuckerberg promoted the book around 2014 and created a hype before Booktok was needed. The trilogy has since sold more than nine million copies worldwide. You have to have a certain affinity with nerds, then the first novel is especially fascinating because of its hardened coldness and sense of over-the-top gigantism. However, the character drawing is stencil-like and the dialogue is often stiff.

“Trisolaris” is aimed at the global market. Without the name of the Chinese author above it, the books could have been largely written by a Westerner. The plot offers more entertainment than ambitious literature such as Stanisław Lem or Isaac Asimov. A phenomenon that literary scholar Moritz Bassler described as ‘midcult’: the leveling of stylistic idiosyncrasies and innovative scope in favor of international marketability.

The built-in math and science lessons are clear. This is how the three-body problem is explained at a pool table; the impossibility of predicting which paths three bodies will follow under the influence of their mutual attraction. The question of who should actually benefit from aliens landing on Earth is also worth thinking about. The author worked full-time as a computer engineer at a power plant until the late 1990s.

Cixin Liu’s image took a major hit when he endorsed the Chinese government’s oppression of the Uyghur minority in a detailed portrait in the New Yorker in 2019. In the same piece, the author remarkably said that “all hell would break loose if China transformed itself into a democracy.”

Five US senators then sent an angry letter to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, asking him to reconsider the planned adjustment. The streaming service was able to downplay the concerns with practiced PR language like “We have nothing to do with the author,” and the controversy has since gone quiet.

Under Mao, science fiction was still taboo. The belief in the existence of aliens was poorly compatible with Marxist materialism. Thanks in no small part to the success of Cixin Liu, the genre is flourishing today and is sometimes even supported by the government. Chinese authors have received the international Hugo Award, the most important prize for science fiction literature, several times.

But the relationship with the state is not unproblematic, especially under Xi Jinping. Last October, the Hugo Awards took place for the first time in China, in the metropolis of Chengdu. As the Guardian recently reported, a controversy arose over authors being excluded from the prize – possibly because they had covered topics such as Tibet in their works that the government did not approve of.

Not only in this case, but constantly, literature moves in the field of tension between artistic freedom and state restrictions. Direct criticism of Chinese policy is virtually impossible within the country. There must be clever alienation effects that can be used to circumvent censorship.

Authors like Chen Qiufan (“The Silicon Island”) move their setting to the fictional terrain of the future, but address real grievances, such as a gigantic e-waste dump. Hao Jingfang, the first Chinese woman to win the Hugo Award in 2016 for her story “Beijing Wrinkles,” divides the Chinese capital into three zones, leaving open interpretations of the country’s social imbalance.

In 2019, she said diplomatically and meaningfully: “Your fears, the West’s fears about China, are largely the result of a lack of understanding. At the same time, I am convinced that China needs important reforms. But they must go hand in hand with thousands of years of history.”

Science fiction literature primarily reflects the gigantic rise that China has experienced in recent decades. The knowledge that “the 19th century will be that of Britain, the 20th that of the US and the 21st that of China” has long been known to historians. Only gradually are the full effects felt everywhere. The world is currently looking at a Russia looking forward to its past greatness. But the future belongs to the Middle Kingdom.

The achievements for which China celebrates itself seem to spring from a futuristic fantasy: since the 1980s, some 900 million people have escaped absolute poverty; However, this is with controversial standards. The country has the largest high-speed rail network in the world, which is partly managed by artificial intelligence. China has become the most important partner for many African countries, and in Latin America it is competing for Taiwan’s favor. Chinese researchers are currently developing a project that sounds like science fiction: an energy shield made of plasma against radiation attacks.

However, the dark side of technological development is dystopian: total surveillance and oppression. The Chinese population is cut off from parts of the internet. The social credit system rewards the government with points for desired behavior. The goal is to create a model citizen who, as an individual among all, fits perfectly into the vague concept of the “fatal community of humanity.” This is essentially a world order under China’s soft, orderly leadership.

For China, the global success of its science fiction works is the ideological soft power through which it can demonstrate its great power. Despite all the ambiguity, some of this spirit can also be found in Cixin Liu, who always emphasizes that he only wants to write good stories. Of course, China’s leadership role in “Trisolaris” is presented in a much more subtle way than in American Cold War thrillers: as a nation aware of problems more serious than Earth’s measly conflicts and willing to move decisively forward go to find a solution.

The burden of expectations weighed heavily on series creators David Benniof and DB Weiss, and not just because of a rumored $160 million budget. On the one hand, the two are largely responsible for the creation of “Game of Thrones,” which is now part of the series canon. On the other hand, also because of the ending, which had to be improvised due to the lack of a book and was so poorly received that disappointed fans requested a new recording.

Although all three novels are now available, the makers, who have received support from Alexander Woo, put on the brakes at the start of ‘3 Body Problem’. Gingerly, almost sedately, the series moves through plot points in routine, glossy images. It takes three or four episodes before the momentum picks up and the bigger picture behind the strange events is revealed: this time, it’s not winter that’s coming.

A real drawback is the broad cast of characters, whose individual stories are scattered and whose actors (including Benedict Wong and John Bradley) sometimes remain too smooth and uncharacteristic. Anyone who is not familiar with the book can easily get lost on this path, as there is no great potential for identification. Just like the philosophical and physical complexity of the template, which is here reduced to well-behaved sayings.

At least the series has a few more moments in store as it progresses. Especially with the scenes in the world of the virtual reality game, the creators went to the extreme: when millions of soldiers with flags form a human megacomputer, the feeling of dizzying scale is created. Conclusion: “3 Body Problem” has made a solid start to something even more daring, but we’re still waiting to reach for the stars.