The Three-Body TV series
The Three-Body TV series
Chinese science fiction makers will inspire our long march to the stars.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
In a previous newsletter I discussed a paper by Giulio Tononi, Larissa Albantakis and others on the metaphysical and ontological implications of Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Now Tononi, Albantakis and others have published an outline of the next iteration (4.0) of IIT.
Like the previous one, the paper hints at a new forthcoming book by Tononi, titled “On Being.” No ETA is given, but Albantakis says:
I don’t consider IIT a complete theory of being and consciousness, at least not yet, but I think it offers important insights and I follow its developments with keen attention.
On Saturday February 4 I’ll host a Turing Church meeting at 11am ET (8am PT, 5pm CET), via Zoom. You are invited! Please feel free to come, listen, and discuss whatever you like. The Zoom access coordinates are in the Turing Church meetings calendar.
I’m watching “Three-Body” - a TV series produced by Tencent Video, based on Cixin Liu’s science fiction masterpiece “The Three-Body Problem.” I’m also reading the book again. The series has 30 episodes. I’ve watched 12 episodes so far. Thanks Derik for alerting me!
The series is professionally done, with good photography and English subtitles often taken from Ken Liu’s translation of the novel. Chinese viewers praise the series for staying close to the novel. In fact, so far I’ve seen only minor changes. All main character but one have appeared, and I hope the missing character won’t be combined with another. In general, I hope the series will stay as close as possible to the novels. Yes, novels: there are three novels. I guess these 30 episodes will stop at the end of the first novel, and I hope there will be two more seasons.
There’ll also be a Netflix adaptation, and it will be interesting to see which one is best. My money is on Tencent - I’m afraid Netflix will Westernize the story too much and dumb it down for stupid Western audiences (we’re not stupid, but they think we are).
In a previous newsletter I wondered, where is the new science fiction epic that will inspire the young like “2001: A Space Odyssey” inspired my generation?
A TV series is meant to be entertainment, not art. Watching “Three-Body” and other good science fiction TV (I’m thinking of “The Expanse”) I have the impression of solid entertainment, professionally mass-produced in a factory. But nothing more.
Art changes culture and changes the world. The “2001” film of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke was a work of art. The “Three-Body” TV series is no art, but Liu’s novels are works of art. President Obama found Liu’s trilogy “wildly imaginative, really interesting… immense.”
Chinese science fiction makers, first and foremost Cixin Liu but also young upcoming writers, film and TV producers and directors, have what it takes to make new science fiction epics that will inspire our long march to the stars.
Optimism is fading out in today’s West, but is alive and well in China. “The China of the present is a bit like America during science fiction’s Golden Age, when science and technology filled the future with wonder,” said Cixin Liu. THIS is what makes a difference.
In Liu’s trilogy we find real people, real aliens, highly speculative but disciplined imagination, space expansion, interstellar spaceflight, human and cosmic futures, “magic” technology, extra dimensions, and nearly everything that makes us love science fiction. We find that cosmic something which makes the young strive to be part of it. And make no mistake, some of Liu’s young readers will change the world.
Cixin Liu quoted Arthur Clarke as a major influence. “I went out to look at the sky after closing the book,” he said about his first encounter with Clarke’s “2001” novel. “I stood alone under the splendid starry sky, confronting the enormous mystery that the human mind could not understand. From then on, the starry sky has completely changed in my eyes, a sensation like when one leaves a pond to see the ocean.”
This is the right attitude, and it connects with Chinese readers. In the preface to the English translation (also by Ken Liu) of “The Redemption of Time” (2019), a work of fan fiction set in the Three-Body universe, Chinese science fiction writer Baoshu describes the enthusiasm of Chinese science fiction readers. There are, of course, other up and coming Chinese science fiction writers (1, 2) who have what it takes to create great science fiction epics. The “Three-Body” series shows that Chinese filmmakers have the technical skills to follow with great films.
The episodes of “Three-Body” are being released on the YouTube channel of Tencent Video. This table (which has been followed so far) shows the release dates of the episodes. The light blue rows show the delayed release dates of the unpaywalled episodes. I look forward to watching the last episode (30) on March 6.
Here’s my 2014 review of the first book of “The Three-Body Problem,” the first part of the trilogy:
The Three-Body Problem, classic science fiction with China flavor
by Giulio Prisco, 2014
“The Three-Body Problem,” the first book of a best-selling Chinese science fiction trilogy that sold more than a million of copies in China, is finally available in English translation. The book is solid classic science fiction, like the best space operas of vintage science fiction that we loved and still fondly remember as our first introduction to space and science.
For us, the starry-eyed children of the 60s who watched Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, and used to think that we would have cities in space in the early 21st century, it’s painful to realize that the West came back from the Moon more than 40 ago, and the next persons to walk on the Moon will probably be Chinese.
The space program of the 60s - the real, visionary space program - was imagined and developed by science fiction readers turned scientists and engineers. Same for the Internet revolution of the 80s and 90s, which is now beginning to rapidly change the world. Arguably, the spectacular advances of science and technology of the last few decades are due to the ability of classic “Golden Age” science fiction to ignite the minds of young readers with science and advanced technology, sense of wonder, and radical can-do imagination.
Other radical advances and technological Golden Ages have been imagined and predicted - nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, the fusion of mind and machine - but these haven’t materialized yet. We have some disturbing sense of stagnation looming ahead, and according to Neal Stephenson we, in the West, have lost the capacity to think big. Science fiction itself seems to be giving up its core mission of stimulating people - and young future scientists - to think big.
China is starting to think big and seems poised to take the pole position in the race toward a bright technological future on Earth and in space. That’s why I was impatiently waiting to read this book and find out what science fiction is being written by leading Chinese authors. Even more than that, I wanted to know what science fiction Chinese readers enjoy. Are they reading the same kind of stories that we used to read? Do their stories put young readers’ minds on fire and prepare them for big enterprises?
After reading the book, my answer is yes. The author, Liu Cixin (I am following the Chinese convention and putting the family name first), is currently the most popular Chinese science fiction writer. One of his previous novels is the delicious “The Wandering Earth” - pure sense of wonder in the spirit of the best Golden Age science fiction - where our heroic descendants bring the whole Earth to another star to escape a solar catastrophe.
The New York Times reports that Liu grew up reading the British master Arthur C. Clarke. “Everything that I write is a clumsy imitation of Arthur C. Clarke,” Liu said. Will future inspiring, epic science fiction be manufactured in China like so many other things these days, and come with China flavor? Perhaps, and why not.
“The Three-Body Problem” has been translated by Ken Liu (Western naming convention now), who is an acclaimed science fiction writer himself. The story begins in the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution, which leave young astrophysicist Ye Wenjie battered for life. She will become part of the first Chinese SETI project to contact alien intelligences out there, and find a way to use the Sun to amplify low-power signals sent from Earth. Eight years later, she will receive the first message from the stars:
In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation… On this day, however, Ye saw something odd when she glanced at the waveform display. Even experts had a hard time telling with the naked eye whether a waveform carried information. But Ye was so familiar with the noise of the universe that she could tell that the wave that now moved in front of her eyes had something extra. The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul. She was certain that the radio signal before her had been modulated by intelligence.”
In our days, nano-scientist Wang Miao is drafted into a secret international defense operation against unknown enemies. Something odd is happening - leading scientists commit suicide because they don’t believe in science anymore, and it seems that the laws of physics themselves have been suspended - or tampered with. The mystery may be related to “Three Body,” an addictive virtual reality game set on a planet under three suns, whose unstable orbits cause frequent civilization collapses.
Liu Cixin finds a working compromise between epic story telling and character development - Wenjie, Miao and others are developed less than in modern Western science fiction, but more than in classic vintage space operas, with just enough depth to be credible without taking the focus away from the story. My favorite character, and I am sure many reader will agree, is the no-nonsense, abrasive but incredibly sharp, chain-smoking street cop “Big Shi.”
I don’t want to say too much and spoil your reading pleasure but yes, the exchanges with the stars initiated by Ye Wenjie continued, and the aliens are coming. Their fleet will be here in 450 years, but the aliens are already messing around to make us weaker before the invasion. We get a glimpse of their world, filtered by the imagination of Wenjie as she goes over the exchanges that have taken place since the first transmission. The superscience of the aliens is very much super indeed, with extradimensional technology and all that, and they think of us as bugs. But, as Big Shi says, bugs can fight back.
You must wait for the second book in the trilogy to know what happens next (unless you read Chinese, of course). I am impatiently waiting for the next books to quench my thirst for inspiring science fiction, and I am sure that some of the young Chinese fans of Liu Cixin are beginning to think big, and will do great things.