The 3 Body Problem Book

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/03/3-body-problem.html.
This article was meant to be a review of the indigenous Chinese TV adaptation to The 3 Body Problem novel by Cixin Liu, 三体, but my plans had to change. The series has thirty forty-five minute episodes and therefore I expected it to have a slower pace and include more details than the Netflix one. It did indeed and it was far better. There are several reasons, probably because it was a native production based on a native book. It's a Chinese story and so in my view only real Chinese writers, directors and actors could capture its essence. This is why I always call for "natural casting" in any TV programme or film. So many beloved franchises have been ruined when they break that rule. What's more it is happily devoid of wokery, that particularly occidental vice. That being said, the actor playing Shi Qiang in the Netflix series, Benedict Wong, is better; even though they changed his name to Clarence Shi (It's not unusual for expat Chinese people to give themselves a second name that matches the local anthroponomy.) Yu Hewei just doesn't portray the hard-bitten cynical chain-smoking cop with quite the same aplomb. However, just when I was getting into it, disaster struck. I was pleased to think that the series was free on Amazon with ads; these were short and unobtrusive, only about two or three one-minuters per episode. I loved the first two episodes; but then when I came to move on to episode three I was faced with a paywall, and a very high one at that. Each episode of forty-five minutes was £2.49 and the entire series in HD was a whopping £62. That is extortionate! It's very manipulative of Amazon to let people watch the first two episodes, getting them hooked, so they are then enticed into forking out for the rest. (Before you remind me, I'm very well aware that I do that myself with my books too, see: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2015/07/aurora-novel-of-disclosure-sample-first.html, but my books are not overpriced.) I could probably have found the rest of 三体 in "other places" if I looked hard enough, but instead I simply decided to read the book. I had picked up a second-hand paperback from a freecycle stall on somebody's garden wall a few months ago and it has been sitting on my to-read pile gathering dust with the other hundred or so volumes.
 
Cixin Liu's book is distinctly better than the Netflix series; in fact having read the book, the shallowness, pinkness, derivativity and insincerity of the Netflix adaptation is thrown into even sharper relief. Most of the Netflix characters do not exist in the original story. The "Oxford Five" are a rather plastic amalgam of Prof. Wang Miao, an applied physicist who is head of the nanomaterials project. Ye Wenjie and her story are pretty much the same and her ill-fated daughter, the first of the mysterious scientist suicides, is called Yang Dong instead of Vera Ye. Unlike the Oxford Five, Wang knows Yang Dong and is her close friend and colleague. He nurses a secret crush on her, but she is dating another scientist, a hippy-like fellow named Yi Ding. The back-story of Ye Wenjie's youth at the Red Coast observatory is reproduced quite well, but her actions in the book are far more extreme. The reader will see her ruthless streak developing very early on. She will do anything to achieve the objectives that only she, Mike Evans and their organization know about. In that way she reminds me a bit of J Posadas and his own belief in saviours from the stars, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/01/j-posadas-and-alien-communists.html. In the book, the aliens are called "Trisolarans" and not "San Ti". Mike Evans is not Vera/Yang Dong's father; Yang Weining is, a Red Coast engineer Ye Wenjie married in the late '60's. There are lots of footnotes, which is rare in a novel. They explain various linguistic idioms and cultural or historical details that a non-Chinese person might not know about. No doubt the Chinese find some of the subtleties of being British equally peculiar. The timecodes do not just cloud people's vision, the Trisolaran "sophon" agents have the power to place them onto photographs. Despite their misanthropic revolutionary vision, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization develops its own schisms... they're only human after all! The Adventists seek the total obliteration of the old order by the extermination of mankind, but the Redemptionists have projected onto the Trisolarans a divine persona; they become a cult. They call the Trisolarans "Our Lord". There are also the Survivors, Adventists who plan to maintain a small human population after the invasion, but totally enslaved to their Trisolaran occupiers. The reader is introduced to the ETO's enemies fighting them and the aliens, called "Frontiers of Science" and their "Battle Command Centre", right at the beginning of the story. The reason Yang Miao is asked to stop the nanotech project is because the material could be used to help humans explore space more effectively, threatening extraterrestrial civilizations. The computer game is used to test potential ETO recruits, but it is played with a full-body suit, not just a headset. The sky projections don't happen; they are merely engineered in radiation beyond visible light. It is understandable for dramatic effect that an adaptation in the visual arts would change that scenario to the more dramatic version. In the book Thomas Wade, the character possibly based on Miles Johnston, also does not exist; although some of his dialogue and role is given to another character absent from Netflix, a Colonel Stanton. Most interestingly of all, a couple of the scenes actually take place on Trisolaris; the real one, not just the computer game. This reveals to the reader that there is no fake alien invasion going on; it's a very true occurance. The book ends with postscripts by the author and translator, and a teaser prologue for the sequel. This is definitely the best story I've ever read about SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. It even beats the film Contact, which is very good. The book ends before a lot of the narrative from the later Netflix series takes place, which shows that the latter is also an adaptation of some of its sequel, The Dark Forest. The "wallfacers" do not appear in The 3 Body Problem. I found a commentary resource that says Netflix do not cover the complete second novel and that one can enjoy book two without spoilers if you've seen the series. Indeed, I sensed that the Netflix one had a rather abrupt and truncated ending. Needless to say Sarah, Miles, myself and any other truther did not inspire Liu's 2008 novel. I'll look forward to reading and reviewing the rest of the "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/11/climate-change-portal.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/04/seti-success.html.