3 Body Problem - Series Review vs Book 1

I read the first book of Liu Cixin's trilogy (translated from Chinese by Ken Liu) in 2016. So, fittingly, just about enough time has passed for a radio transmission to reach and return from the Proxima Centauri system... Also, more than enough time for me to forget many of the details! So I was not overly focused on expected plot waypoints, or any finer details, in the new Netflix series.

This streaming adaptation is by Benioff & Weiss, of Game of Thrones infamy, plus Alexander Woo (True Blood writer, apparently). Thankfully, they won't have to make up their own ending from scratch, this time. But given that the books reportedly get increasingly grand in cosmological scope and concept, we'll have to see what they make of the rest, come season 2. Hopefully not too far off!

Book 1 (left). Netflix series thumbnail (right).

► My Initial Impressions of the Show [Low Spoiler]: the pacing was good and quick, despite the 1 hour episodes. So some of the many hard sci-fi concepts were shaved down to "blink and you'll miss it". Some things maybe discarded from the plot a little too soon. There was a frustrating lack of discussion of major events, following on from the big dramatic episode endings. 

But they managed to include a surprisingly large amount of the original material and feel, while finding a better compromise for retaining audience attention. Better than the somewhat laboured tour of scientific history, etc, in the first book. I was still surprised to see the show reach the main plot culmination of book one by the end of of the Ep 5. With 3 left to go! Apparently, they linearized the trilogy timeline, including a lot from Dark Forest and even some from Death's End.

I was a little disappointed how almost all the contemporary (2024) setting of the show was plonked down in London. Deploying a distracting remobilisation of GoT resources, with a far more 'international' cast than the books. White-washed vs the novels? Perhaps. But it worked well; the main characters were utterly remixed into an original ensemble, with more compelling personalities and social relationships. 

And there's already been a 30 episode (!) Chinese TV series adaptation, released in early 2023, with all Chinese cast. Apparently it drags badly, literally converting almost everything from the books. *Except* for the Netflix series' brutal opening scene, in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Chinese audience gets historical censorship, while we get soft power propaganda, only seeing the horribly outdated worse of China's tumultuous political neurosis and industrial devastation of nature.

► Specific Critiques [Major Spoilers]: 

• VR headsets - one of my few notes on the book (that failed to make it into a blog post at the time) was that the full body VR suit and headset had anachronistic capabilities. Able to give a similarly full immersive experience, with touch, temperature, etc, despite being based in 2012.

So, re-imagining the headsets as impossibly high-tech magic was probably a necessity for suspension of disbelief. Making them plausible while capturing the feel of the books and producing iconic promo images. I was sad that there was no explanation of who, on earth, was making the devices. I wonder if some viewers took them as coming direct from the aliens, undermining the whole transportation problem, etc. 

• Advances - I think the books may make it explicit, that there's a policy of not giving any humans more advanced technology. Because, of course, that would undermine the whole crippling science thing. A concept I felt the show didn't quite hammer home. How all human advances come from technologies that come out of the scientific process of testing diverse hypotheses through increasingly involved interactions with reality. 

Let alone my feeling that our civilisation will collapse if this were even to stall for a couple decades, at this point. But they do spell out that (human) exponential tech progress would doom the conquering fleet to be a "funeral procession", with its 400 year travel time. 

• "Sophons" - in the show, appeared far too powerful! A book-naïve viewer would probably get the impression that they hacked all the phones and TVs in the world simultaneously with "you are bugs" message. So could easily bring down all our IT infrastructure, crash planes, cars, etc at will. Apparently, in the later books, this will have been a San-Ti (the aliens) aligned human faction. Perhaps some of those groomed by the game.

But also, the "eye in the sky", with a Sophon spreading darkness as it unfurls around the Earth, massively over-steps the books. It implies that it could simply starve us of light, trivially wiping out humanity. That, or it's projecting perfect VR images into every human's eyes simultaneously. Compared to the books (I think) only able to project countdowns onto a room full of key people's retinas, one at a time, rapidly enough to appear simultaneous. 

A vulgar display of power: every screen is hacked and a reflective skein blots out the sky. End of episode 5 "Judgement Day". Then, like the blinking stars at the end of Ep1, it's inexplicably business as usual, with the next instalment.

The kind of direct line of sight manipulation, depicted in the show, on its own, is too powerful. Making it trivial to kill anyone in transport accidents. 

• Interstellar conquest is so passé - The logical conclusion to draw is that the aliens are merely toying with human civilisation. Perhaps this is all a big brain move to make us come together constructively and save ourselves. Although, some reviewers talk about making sure we don't pull out a literal scorched Earth strategy, when faced with imminent destruction. Fire all the nukes, I guess. And not in space.

The entire concept of them travelling all this way, for a safe new place to live, is pretty ridiculous. All the super-tech to fly their cosmic cradle, to just jump back into someone else's nest..? I mean, they could go anywhere. But with computers inside atoms, goodness knows what kind of computronium they could build to inhabit virtual worlds, etc. With a fleet of ships/habitats that can easily avoid star related problems. 

But then, I guess The Dark Forest theory might come into play, and it's then more a question of kill or be killed, by any other spacefaring civilisation that knows of your existence. Game theory, prisoner's dilemma, etc. Just ludicrous timing that both solar systems fledged civilisations at the same time, reaching for the starts within a few hundred years, out of billions.

• Lies - It seems wild that the San-Ti... The show's name for them is apparently closer to the Chinese...  The aliens supposedly only figure out that humans can communicate untruths decades into close communication with them. Having crafted a video game with one faction and being all-seeing, with the Sophons. Suddenly it hits, during Red Riding Hood story time. Right.

 

China Mieville's "Embassy Town" (2011) makes clear the ridiculousness of any sentient society being unable to comprehend the concept of untrue information. I think fallacies are inherent to memetic brains; wrong ideas can spread just as easily, if they sound good. Gödel's incompleteness theory makes clear that contradictions are actually a fundamental part of the most rigorous formal systems. I.e. maths lies! 

So aliens will have to understand the concept of misinformation and fallibility. Even if they supposedly evolved as part of some psychic hive mind. Which itself seems questionable, given the disparate faction who initially answers Ye Wenjie's first contact message, warning her "DO NOT RESPOND", etc. Is there room for such polar opposite positions, within a society where to think is to communicate? And "if one survives, we all survive"..?

• Sliced and diced - I felt that the destruction of Judgement Day worked really well in the show. Portrayed as a bizarre massacre, with strong conflicting feeling of wonder and disgust. This is one aspect of the book I certainly remembered, expected and thought translated well. With sufficient justification for such carnage. But a friend (who'd not previous read) found it excessively gratuitous and gave up on the series. Not sure if this is a bit of a Red Wedding moment.

Nano-fibre-type weapons are a mainstay of hard sci-fi. AKA monofilament, monomolecular wire, etc. Eg from Reynolds, Stross, Banks (I think), off the top of my head. So it was cool to see the terrifying potential of this advanced material science laid out for a general audience.

• The 'game' - The book really drags out working through the "Three-Body Problem", making it glaringly obvious its purpose is to educate the reader on history of human understanding of orbital mechanics. Ridiculous that it takes so much time for the protagonist, etc, to figure out what's going on, when the conundrum is literally in the title of the game!

Both (the show too) make it ambiguous if the other theoreticians, vying for the emperor's favour, are human players or NPCs. Which is kind of unnecessarily awkward, in that neither feels quite right.

The entire concept of this game is overly specific to physicists. If it's supposedly used as a recruitment tool, that's not going to be helpful for hiring all those hackers the org needs

 

length and personnel specificity... Players or NPCs... Incongruous tour of the history of orbital mechanics theory.

• 3 body nonsense - In reality, there aren't really any star systems as chaotic as that depicted. Or rather, they can only exist for a brief few million years. There's an anthropic/evolutionary process eliminating or adapting these: some of the stars collide (merging), or one gets ejected into deep space, or the whole system could theoretically settle down into one of many specific regular solutions to the n-body problem. Of which scientists/mathematicians continue to find exponentially more possibilities. Despite the lack of a general solution.

Real universe Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf that orbits stably 370 times father out than the distance between Alpha Centauri A and B. Which orbit each other stably at a distance equivalent to Sun-Pluto. They effectively act as a single body, as far as Proxima is concerned. And its Earth sized habitable zone planet, discovered in 2016 (!), is perfectly safe, there. 

Anton Petrov explains all this very eloquently, with visual aids, in his video:

• Staircase - this was a cool remix of the Orion project. But the show's casual use of existing ICBM nukes (glossed over), on seemingly months (maybe years) of lead time, would clearly have been very impossible. It was unclear if the sail would pass around each nuke, with a hole in the middle presumed. But with no active steering on it, each successive explosion would presumably amplify any perturbation. 

Also, even with purpose built new launch vehicles, the nukes couldn't just be left floating in space in a pre-formed line, as shown. Orbital mechanics gets in the way big time, ironically enough. They'd either be orbiting Earth (as it appeared), or the sun. Either way, the further out ones would be moving successively slower, so there would be only one very precise time window where they all aligned in syzygy. Before rapidly staggering into progressively more shuffled positions with each rotation. Maybe book 2 explains how this could be made to work? 

► Conclusion: for all it's critical acclaim, I found the first book a little tiresome and silly. The concluding chapters kinda jumping the shark for me (don't remember the details). It's only hard sci-fi in referencing lots of real science and interesting concepts. It fails to be plausible in a universe like ours, for very fundamental reasons that we're already sure of. Even excusing axioms.

I had been about to bite the bullet (struggling for content) and embark on reading the second book. That is until I found out this series had been made and released. Never mind that now!

I'm keen to see the conclusion of the Netflix series. Which I (perhaps unfairly) accommodate more latitude, given a broader audience. I think I'd prefer it if they condense the rest of the trilogy into a single series, for quicker culmination. I expect that will still take a couple years to bring to the screen. Who knows wtf will have happened with AI, world war, or whatever, by then?!