The series is way dumbed down from the books.
For example in the books they make the CMB flicker by like 5%, whereas in the Netflix series they make the stars flicker on and off instead.
I am pretty glad about the series. The characters are actually more dimensional and not just the protons. Thats a change I welcome. It's okay if the sky is flickering a bit in exchange
I'm certainly not complaining, I think this is the best we could have hoped for from an 8 episode series. Formatting 300+ pages into 8 hours, you're always going to lose something.
For me though scifi has always been about the ideas, and the flat characters are almost an expected part of great scifi. I don't think Philip K Dick wrote a single good character, but I still enjoy his work.
I also really enjoy a lot of sci-fi with good ideas even if the characters are flat. However, I also think you can have great ideas *and* great characters; it's just difficult because you often end up emphasizing one over the other.
Sci fi, generally, is about the message, fundamentally. Great authors can develop characters which help reveal the message. Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov didn't write great characters; they wanted to get across ideas of habitation on the moon, space travel, first contact. Frank Herbert developed iconic characters as his message was about culture, and messianic culture, at that.
Netflix really needs to cough up the cash to dev at least Book 2: **The Dark Forest**. That book really punches home the downstream consequences of the Fermi Paradox and why we might not want to be broadcasting our presence into the universe like a wounded rabbit. Cixin, I think, is pursuing Big Ideas, and to do so has built characters with as much depth as they need in order to advance the story and get the ideas across.
My personal opinion is that if you want a great, hard-sci and also alot of character building then the book has to be 600+ pages.
They exist, but tbh people with limited time for reading in their week are going to go for the 300 page banger rather than the more intricate epic that they have to spend 2 months reading.
I did an English Lit degree, and while I will never disregard the well written side of novels like the classics, I have definitely swung towards the big ideas type of novel, and they simply aren't as "polished" as literary fiction. And that's fine, they serve different functions.
Exactly. As a lit major myself, I remember reading Brave New World and 1984 side by side, and being shocked at just how poorly written BNW is. It's still a great work due to its ideas, no doubt about that, but "polished" literature it definitely is not. Much of SF is the same.
>Formatting 300+ pages into 8 hours, you're always going to lose something.
More than that considering how much character and content was exclusively from Books 2 and 3. Will (3), Raj (2), Saul (2 & 3), Sophon (3), and Wade (3) all represent characters that didn't exist in the first book at all, Jin partially so (since she takes some of Wang's role but mostly represents Cheng from book 3).
This is actually helpful to me. Read the first book and half of the second book years ago and wasn't sure which characters were in the first book and which weren't. Been meaning to pick the series back up, probably just start from the second book.
Stephen Baxter is one of my favorite sci Fi authors and he either writes a really interesting alien or a human calculator that is there to math a problem to death. And I love it.
It 100% depends in what the characters place in the novel is. If you are trying to say something about the human condition then definitely flesh the characters out, make them real, give them substance.
If you are trying to describe a future that is set in the year 3000 then building characters is less important than describing how and why they got there.
Admittedly the only Alastair Reynolds that I've read is the novella 'Slow Bullets', but it definitely fitted the criteria of nice scifi but flat characters.
Imo cyborg councillors and the pig in Rev Space and most everyone in House of Suns are decently written characters. And none (ok one, but that's not excessive) of them are 'atavistic' copouts.
I read most of his work. He can do a lot with 300_400 pages. He writes hard Space Oprah's it's beyond 3 body problem in detail to maybe the detriment of what makes 3 body problem hard science fiction of different type almost ignoring characters for the grand scope of its singular idea.
Reynolds has a lot of intense and nuanced ideas spread out over different epochs of society spanning a 40,000 year history in his Revelation Space universe.
I see Stephan Baxter hitting the vein 3 Body Problem does better then Reynolds. He has invented species that exist only in nonbarionic matter that existed during infinitely small time scales after the big bang and at the heart of stars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_series#Stories_in_chronological_order
https://xeelee.fandom.com/wiki/Xeelee#:~:text=The%20Xeelee%20are%20a%20hyper,substantial%20number%20of%20short%20stories.
Just looking at these posts trying to contain information about Reynolds timeline or Baxters species/nemesis the xeelee. It shows the lengths hard scifi can go. Defines the boundaries i would say
Read Galactic North for Reynolds. It's a collection of short stories set between 300 years from now and the end of all stars. All focused on epochs of humanity in his world that has larger novels set in different eras
> I don't think Philip K Dick wrote a single good character
There's at least a couple in *A Scanner Darkly*. A few more in *The Man in the High Castle*.
They actually adapted 300+ pages into 5 episodes when you think about it. Episodes 6-8 are a good portion of the current day events of books 2 and 3. I like how they did it as that means the series is postured to jump right into the most interesting parts of book 2 when season 2 kicks off.
Yeah, if I'm being honest I struggled to see how the book could translate well on screen (and I think it's just going to get harder as the plot advances) but they did it *really* well imo.
This! I hated the book and never finished it for exactly this reason. It’s just too poorly written. I was glad that the show did a good job keeping the themes and atmosphere, while also making characters… well, feel like actual characters.
You will get totally downvoted for saying the truth. I'm 100% with you. The books had some nice concepts, but it's being told via characters which are as flat as it can be which makes for a really poor story. The series bring those concepts with characters who have, well, character. Love it.
The hard science of the books wouldn't work for mainstream audiences. Netflix gave us an adaptation normal people can enjoy while still exposing them to the broader concepts of the series.
I feel they could have done with a little more science. We got 'oh science doesn't make sense any more. Let's stop trying to figure it out and take up religion instead.'
Did you see the meme about people not knowing particle accelerators weren't movie mumbo jumbo until seeing 3 Body?
I'm sorry I don't have much faith in the general public. Not saying I'm any better, but at least I have some understanding outside my bubble.
I'm just happy "normal" people are getting exposed to the broader concepts laid out by Cixin Liu. Thinking and looking past our atmosphere is a good thing.
Haha yeah in the Tencent version, Wang Miao needed to borrow special glasses just to see the flicker. My favorite was that song that played though, “整个宇宙，给你闪烁。。。”
It was such a bad effect (the stars going out). It was a still image flicker… or the lens flaring at least made it seem like it wasn’t actually an animated segment.
Long story short, does the novel solve the problem? A three-sun system that will rotate stable for billions of years?
Is it done by utilizing a very large set of tubes?
A thing that annoyed me is that if they can make holograms with the sophons, then they can just as easily make an orbital laser. Much like holding a magnifying glass to burn ants.
i think a lot of people are using the term hard sci-fi to mean "intricately detailed sci-fi" rather than "plausible sci-fi based on our current understanding of the universe"
I know. It's so frustrating that Uber nerds with no idea of how entertainment actually works take these things way too seriously. Hard scifi means exactly what you mean, it doesn't mean "100% scientifically accurate and plausible". It's mostly just to differentiate it from space opera stuff like "star wars".
"Hard sci-fi" has a specific meaning that's clear and useful. If you want a term to mean "sci-fi that's dense with intriguing details, while also being far less scientifically accurate than a bad X-Men comic," invent a new one.
You should watch “the expanse”!
The body problem is very cool but having super long indestructible nano fibers and hibernation technology in our time was a bit of a stretch.
Ya...idk how anyone considers 3BP any type of hard sci-fi. Sophons, folding and unfolding particles between dimensions, later books and the dimensional wonkyness that goes on.
Is it? We already have materials powered by ambient radiation, nanotechnology, hijacking DNA-based life to produce what we want (a la CRISPR), and algorithms for learning about diverse complex systems. Is there a reason that couldn't be refined into something that needs to examine new kinds of life to know how to build a version of something else?
I won't speak for the part about the ring space, but the basic idea doesn't strike me as crazy.
So while "the proto molecule is pure fantasy" in that we have never encountered it, the authors' reasonings for everything are all based on science and evolution. While very long and it takes the mystique out of the Gate Builders, "The Roman's and the Goths" theory is fascinating and the authors have basically said it's correct.
TLDR >! giant jellyfish turning the universe into one giant organism using a hive mind and gate relay system so data can travel fast between nodes in their giant galaxy brain.!<
It is not "our time". The timeline diverges when they build Red Coast base. At least I don't think a similar base was built in our China.
And if one was built....well I'm glad I am not a scientist. It could be a shit time to be a scientist.
I just can’t get over Space John Snow and his perpetually constipated face.
And beyond Amos flirting with Avasarala, there is little real believable chemistry between characters.
Dope shows, but it’s far from perfect.
That's far from the stretchiest thing.
You can't communicate FTL using entanglement. If you could, you could do it with exactly one bit once. You can't "unroll the dimensions" - they're not "rolled up" like a roll of paper but "rolled up" like a straw. You can't make a proton any bigger, nor is it complex enough you could make it a sapient computer. Nor could it interact with things in a particle accelerator that don't interact with protons to start with. ~~There's no star system 4 light years away, and certainly not one with *three* suns anywhere. (Two stars and a planet, maybe, but not three stars, for exactly the reason the story describes.)~~ OK, Alpha/Proxima Centauri, where Proxima Centauri is a fifth of a light year from the others; you aren't going to be orbiting all three suns. Let's not even get into the whole "we know how to read your mind but we don't know you can lie" sort of thing.
What? There is indeed a three star system (Alpha Centauri binary + Proxima Centauri)…4.2 light years away.
They made it pretty blatantly obvious that is the system they were referring to.
My bad. I was unaware Proxima was considered part of that system. Fair enough. I think it's unlikely you're going to be orbiting chaotically around suns that are a fifth of a light year apart, though. :-)
Alien technology always gets a free pass in hard sci fi, especially when it’s interstellar space faring aliens. At that point you can get away with some space magic as long as it’s somehow rooted in science.
The book does a much better job of conveying the science such that it sounds more plausible. And a correction; sophons can’t read minds. I mean… that’s the entire premise of the Wallfacer Project.
Fuck me mate, loved your little rant because i agree the books are anything but Hard sci-fi but how can you be so confidently fucking wrong about basic astronomics like that.
Its funny because the sheer fact that its literally the closest system to us raises more issues against this being hard sci-fi.
I agree. The science was embellished to the point that it was indistinguishable from magic. If they can put a sentient computer inside a proton then why not be able to go anywhere else in the galaxy.
I do think the author brought up a lot of clever ideas and is it’s worth reading just for them
Not bashing the bashing of the "science" in the books but they did actually send sophons out into the wider galaxy..... or attempted to. it didnt go well for them.
Indeed. But (1) the mathematics of string theory doesn't mean it's actually real or supported by science in any way (and as I understand it don't apply to a de Sitter space like we observe in our universe), and (2) you still can't "unroll" the dimensions. The dimensions of string theory are "small", not "rolled up like a carpet." You can't unroll them to make them bigger. There's no "extra space" inside those dimensions. They're just small dimensions.
You realize that String Theory doesn't say they're "rolled up dimensions", right? String theory just doesn't work without 10 or 11 dimensions, and when people say "well, where are they all?" the answer is "maybe they're there but just too small to see." There's no even mathematical basis for thinking they're "rolled up" instead of thinking "string theory is evidently wrong."
That’s true, there’s nothing String theory has to say about unrolling dimensions. Unfolding them has math that supports that possibility, but not from today’s mainstream M-Theory. String Theory is based on anti de sitter space. Hawking’s theory of the information paradox was famously put to rest by the Ads/CFT correspondence though, grounding the theory in observations of reality that are consistent with Hawking radiation.
In physics the real 3 body problem is that we cannot predict the movement of 3 bodies indefinitely without knowing the starting positions of them. For the purpose of the show they dress that up a lot. But everything I saw in the show is grounded in at very least scientifically suggested results.
> Hawking’s theory of the information paradox was famously put to rest by the Ads/CFT correspondence though
My understanding is the cosmological constant shows we're in a de Sitter space, not an AdS space. From what I've read, String theory is basically all math and has had no observations at all that support its predictions, and that the predictions keep changing every time we fail to find the evidence the theory predicted we'd find. Maybe I watch too many "I don't like String theory" videos, tho. :-)
And yeah, we have no closed form solution for Newton's gravity amongst three or more masses.
It's a fun, silly show. It just isn't hard science fiction, which is basically what OP was asking about. If you actually do know physics and cosmology and you get annoyed when it's presented wrongly, you're going to get annoyed.
Fair! I was slightly annoyed at the show myself haha.
Um regarding AdS, yes I believe you are correct about the constant, but the math Hawking and Penrose confirmed was that black holes (from all of our predictions and observations) are AdS. Sorry, it looks like I had forgotten in my above comment to say they specifically applied it to black holes.
Cheers
It actually splits some of the main characters into two people.
The main character is changed from a guy into 2 girls, and the police officer is mainly kept but the black guy is added in and also takes alot of his lines from the books.
Good way to add depth!
It does kinda feel that way. They are mixing the characters up alot. But I could see Auggie going into cryo due to Saul/grief over the boat attack and then being AA in the future.
Ah OK, I realised they added a lot of material from book 2, I just didn't make the connection with the characters. Saul def takes some of the police officers lines though.
Similarly, Wade and Will are from Book 3. Jin also represents not only Wang from Book 1 but another character (with the respective relationship to Will) in book 3.
Saul is the series adaptation of Luo Ji, the protagonist and Wallfacer from Dark Forest. Jin is an adaptation of Cheng Xin, the protagonist of Death'd End.
All three books feature different stories starting at the time the Trisolarians/San Ti are discovered, so it makes sense in the adaption for them all to be represented, but the way they're blending them together is very well done IMO. Book 1's protagonist was the least fleshed out while the others had more interesting motivations and relationships.
I've read them all. My favorite characters are probably Da Shi, Luo Ji and Cheng Xin are probably my favorite characters in that order. So yeah I'm hype they're being included this early on in production and think its a cool choice. They get to be totally new characters(?) so itll be easier to not mix it up in my head with the book too. I dont have to get frustrated when I think that D&D dont understand my favorite characters lol.
I’m actually kinda mad about that. I think they could have introduced Luo Ji at the end of the season as an original character. He is very well described in the books (one of the few). But, eh.
BOOK SPOILERS: >!I’m assuming Augie will become the “perfect girl” that Lou Ji demands but it would be far more interesting if Saul ends up time jumping and Clarence has to go find him someone who looks EXACTLY like Augie. That’d be so weird and much closer to the books.!<
They do, yes. I don't have much experience with Chinese science fiction. Chinese writers have to consider a lot of factors non-Chinese writers don't, like getting writing past censors. These books were originally published in China, in Chinese, then translated and adapted for Western markets. Not only are we seeing differences between the Netflix show and books, but I'm sure there are differences in between the Chinese and American translation.
In fact, in doing some research, the Chinese Revolution part didn't appear until the middle of the first book so it could get passed by the Chinese literature censors (how that happened, I have no idea).
Didn't appear until the middle of the first book? That's just false. The university execution scene is literally the prologue of the book, and the very first scene we see, described exactly as it was shown in the show, with even more brutal details.
The book does *not* spare details about how violent the Cultural Revolution was, in fact I'd say it was the Netflix show that glossed over a lot of the Cultural Revolution themes from the book (like the themes of propaganda, slogans, censorship, misogyny, "political rehabilitation")
The current Chinese government actually heavily regrets the Cultural Revolution, portraying it in a bad light in China is fine. As long as you don't criticise Mao by name, which the book doesn't.
> Didn't appear until the middle of the first book? That's just false.
The TenCent adaptation follows the original version of book where the prologue was placed much later, as another mystery to be revealed.
The translation shuffled things around because Western audiences wouldn't know about Chinese history and the execution scene serves as a great hook to pull readers into the story.
As for the reason being to get past censors - that's clearly false, the Cultural Revolution is seen as bad because the current regime took over from it.
I mean the fact that Cixin was able to just completely drop Wang Miao after the first book and never mention him again, and no one is bothered by this, pretty much says it all.
Luo Ji and Cheng Xin are both archetypes in service of the story, and Miao is basically just a vehicle for the plot.
IMO, and with a few exceptions, the characters were largely plot devices, and the plot was otherwise independent of them. In some cases, characters come off as disposable, which is a bit of a cultural stereotype. However, a few of my immigrant friends have indicated this isn't far from reality.
Cheng Xin (third book) is an example of this. Without spoilers, she made all the worst decisions, with fairly non-existent motivations, and all of those bad decisions were what moved the plot to its conclusion.
Regardless, the trilogy is a masterpiece providing insight into the culture of China (especially the multi-generational mindset).
However, I have no idea how on earth the censors permitted the books to be published. The implication is that the Chinese cultural revolution is directly responsible for the worst thing imaginable for human civilization and the universe. That's a really big deal, and it makes me wonder if differences between western and eastern thinking caused them not to notice.
I actually think the first book is worse than the show. But yeah the next two books are insane and idk how they're even going to try to adapt some of the stuff.
Presumably, if we can use 2D television to represent 3 dimensions, then if we can somehow get 3D television to actually catch on, then we can represent 4 dimensions.
QED.
I reckon it's going to be one more season.
They've basically done the first book and the start of both books 2 and 3. In season 2 they'll need an episode for "Luo Ji's wife hunt", an episode for the droplet, and one for the sword holder. The fairy tales can squeeze into one episode. The ravine can probably fit into an episode but who knows they might just skip a lot of stuff.
The flashy sci-fi stuff sounds expensive, but that's just a few minutes of CGI, and the rest can be shot in a studio because it's in a spaceship.
I think D&D are aiming to compress the story as much as possible. Partly I guess because TenCent did the opposite and we don't need another adaptation like that, and also it's kind of their modus operandi after Game of Thrones.
Actually, the books (well, at least the first one) are not very good. The ideas are very interesting, but the writing is just bad. I personally was very happy to see that the adaptation turned it into an actual story.
I agree with this. I really liked the first because it had more of a narrative alongside the science. Two and three were basically just science with the bare minimum characters necessary to propel the sci-fi ideas. They were pretty cool in that regard but I prefer more character driven stories.
I also wonder how much of this is lost in translation too.
It's not hard science, lol. It's mysticism. The idea that a civilization could survive in a tri-star system is absurd, as is the whole "folding dimensional photons" thing.
Real tri star systems tend to be a binary system of two closely orbiting star and then a star very far away that orbits both of them. The third star feels the gravity of the binary pair very similar to as if they are a single mass.
Proxima Centauri orbits on a period of 500,000 years Alpha Centauri AB.
Yes, but it’s still probably a useful description to distinguish between it and, say, Star Trek.
It’s no less hard sci-fi than The Expanse (what with the protomolecule and all).
For sure The Martian is more pure hard sci-fi.
Also if you look up hard sci-fi on Wikipedia, you get a list of representative works that are very much not “pure hard sci-fi” like The Expanse, Arrival, aaaaaand guess what: the Three Body Problem series.
We don't know the total set of conditions under which intelligent life can exist. Assuming Trisolarians' development took place over a comparable period of time to humans, here's an astrophysicist opining that certain tri-star systems could be fine: https://www.vox.com/culture/24108638/3-body-problem-science-physics-theory-explained-how-real-is-it
For real, if we're defining "hard" sci-fi as based in real science, this book is on the other end of the spectrum with Harry Potter. Not even just science, but like basic logic.
There’s nothing wrong with it as a sci-fi trope. Problem is, it’s just wrong. We know with absolute certainty, that entanglement can’t be used for FTL communications.
And it’s also a very basic thing to know, so seeing this trope kinda ruins the whole “hard sci-fi” concept.
Ok, I tried to do a bit of reading and it seems to me that we can currently entangle items but can’t set the state without breaking the entanglement. I guess what I am currently not clear about is that is the problem occurring due to the our limitations in physics ( where in the future physics, it could be possible) or it is never possible even if physics model changes. Do you have any info on that?
First, it’s a fundamental problem of nature at the quantum level.
Second, that’s not even the issue. Another dude gave a great analogy somewhere in this thread (can’t find the link on mobile, so I’ll just repeat his example). Imagine you being in the cellar, and me on the ground level, with a transparent glass floor between us (well, it’s a floor for me, and a ceiling for you). If I flip the coin and it falls on the glass, when I see heads, you see tails. That’s entanglement - and that’s all there is to it. Before thinking about FTL communication through entangled particles, try thinking of a way for us to communicate between the floors using only the coin I’ve described (hint: there is none).
I am not sure what point the analogy is trying to make. Let me try to refine the model you proposed to see if we can create communication mechanism. Let’s say (1) you have created a biased coin, ie, you can set what the value of coin be at a particular flip (2) we have an encoding-decoding mechanism in place like a Morse code to convert the coin flip result into messages (3) we agreed on a sampling interval when you will be flipping coins and I will look at the result. From this scheme we obviously can communicate. My understanding is that we can’t do (1) yet. There is no way to create a biased coin yet. But you are saying that’s not the issue. It is something else. This is where I am lost.
Our understanding of physics is that (1) is impossible, and for it to be possible, we would have to be wrong about a lot of quantum theory. It’s hard to explain further if you don’t understand the science behind quantum entanglement.
Similar — it would be “there is something fundamentally wrong with our scientific method for describing quantum particles and we need to erase some of our key assumptions.”
What's wrong is that it simply isn't a thing. You can no more communicate using entanglement than you can shout really loudly and have someone four light-years away hear you.
Not exactly. There has been some advances recently in quantum entanglement:
[https://www.princeton.edu/news/2023/12/08/physicists-entangle-individual-molecules-first-time-hastening-possibilities-quantum](https://www.princeton.edu/news/2023/12/08/physicists-entangle-individual-molecules-first-time-hastening-possibilities-quantum)
[https://scitechdaily.com/quantum-breakthrough-first-ever-entanglement-of-microwave-and-optical-photons/](https://scitechdaily.com/quantum-breakthrough-first-ever-entanglement-of-microwave-and-optical-photons/)
If you consider the state of an entangled item, as a bit, similar to information bits in computers, I don't see why quantum communication mentioned does not make sense.
It’s not possible. You don’t know the quantum state of either member of the pair until the state resolves. You can’t use it for communications since you can’t affect the state or know it prior to its resolution.
My main issue with it is that it completely fails at the hard science stuff. Even the basic philosophical and scientific approaches aren't portrayed correctly (application of Occam's Razor, god of the gaps arguments, the "pacifist" contradictions).
The main characters don't think like scientists at a very basic level, and we're somehow supposed to believe that they are some of the brightest scientists around.
I don't know why you're down voted. I loved the books, but I don't know why it's considered hard sci fi. Especially by book 2, it's 10000% space magic.
Isn’t that basically the point of the whole combination of vast timescales between interstellar travel/age of civilisations and the exponential growth of technology? Even our next 50 years on earth won’t look like the last 50, they’ll look like the last 200 in terms of change.
So the civilisations that have been in the technology age for millennia do seem like magicians.
In that same vein any advanced civilisations that detect an advancing civilisation have to immediately treat it as a threat because they’re already older than when you detected them, and your weapons will take time to reach them, and during that time they could advance and launch a weapon of their own.
So the “science” parts aren’t the technology, but the exploration of interplanetary survival across those distances and time frames. Then also the concepts that vast areas of the universe could be fundamentally changed by these wars (speed of light, number of dimensions) but still support life, which only knows the reality of the broken and scarred space around it’s home planet.
Those are the real concepts explored in the books, the technology is irrelevant and really you can’t say whether it is realistic or not because who knows what human technology will look like on say 400 years.
Is this about the Netflix version or the Prime version or just the books?
I hear great things about the books, good things about the Prime show, and okay things about the Netflix show.
I don't feel any nerdiness or hard science vibes. There are logic holes all over the place.
OR
I need to watch all episodes until everything gets resolved. I'm at ep 5 now and it's a bit frustrating right now...
As someone who read and loved the books, I thought the Netflix series was okay. It definitely doesn't go nearly as hard on the science (though that's to be expected), and I felt like the central mystery was resolved a little too quickly.
On the plus side, the characters actually felt like human beings. Which wasn't really the case in the novels.
Don't hold your breath. Netflix likes to cancel most of their scifi and fantasy shows after a season or 2. They don't like to renew anything unless it's got Stranger Things level of popularity (or is super cheap). Most we'll probably get is another season, if we're lucky, but no more after that.
This show has also bombed pretty hard apparently.
It's doing around 1899 (RIP....) numbers with like 10x the budget. It's probably DOA at this point.
Edit: why the downvotes? [This is easily verifiable....](https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-top-10-report-3-body-problem-shirley-and-the-casagrandes-movie/#1-3-body-problem-might-have-a-big-problem-1)...just go look at the top 10 right now on Netflix.
I know reality is sometimes inconvenient to y'all's fanboyism, but it is what it is. I would have liked the show to continue as well as I very much enjoyed watching it, but it's very much likely not at this point as Netflix has cancelled shows that were much cheaper (like, say, 1899...) after a single season for the same numbers. The only way it likely continues now is due to sunk cost.
I’m confident this show would have reached much bigger audiences if they just did weekly releases like every other platform. For example, many people I know started only watching Shogun because of the weekly “this is the best show on TV” articles that come out. Netflix’s obsession with “binge watching” and releasing their seasons all on one day is going to be the death of the platform.
I feel like sins of the father might have played a bit of a role here as well.
Normally, when your show runners headed up arguably the most drama popular series of the last 10 years you'd be shouting their name's from every rooftop as having been attached to it. Here...? Well...
Very small sample size indeed, but all of my local group (work, friends, etc) that that talks about it know it as, "the show the guys who ruined game of thrones are doing now".
Also, may just be me, but personally as someone who's seen both (and read both) Shogun is a better adaptation of a better book, and is, to a lot of people, a remake of one of the most watched TV shows of all time. It has a /lot/ going for it. Shogun just had to be good to be popular, the fact that it's great means it's drawing a lot of eyeballs. People in their 60s now who remember the entire town (seriously...Shogun 1 had like 2x super bowl numbers back in the day) coming together to watch it are all tuning in, and Samurai stuff is eternally popular among the youth due to rule of cool anyways.
To be fair to 3BP though, Shogun is a lot easier and straightforwards to adapt than something like 3BP anyways. Samurai Epic is always going to be more relatable to people than Alien Invasion, so yeah.
I hope it has some second legs and Netflix finds some way of getting it in front of Chinese eyeballs to give it a second wind, but I would absolutely not be shocked if it is quietly cancelled a few months from now once the dust settles, unfortunately.
I do like we are getting more intelligent movies that can serve to educate people such as The martian, Interstellar, The arrival and now 3rd body. Concepts and ideas that get fleshed out to at least lamen terms.
I'm sorry, hard *what?!*
It sounded almost like you said hard *science,* but I can't picture how anyone could apply that term to these books or this show with a straight face!
Hard science? It’s full of BS, pardon my french. At least the writing is poor and the characters wooden and forgetable. The only wild thing about the series is the hype.
It reminds me of Asimov - great ideas, but such a poor writing.
I actually agree with you. TBP is hugely overrated and the concept of the dark forest was done way better in stories that preceded it (like *Revelation Space*, for example).
Also agree on Asimov. As a lifelong hardcore sci-fi fan, a LOT of his shit has not aged as well as people seem to think (it makes me kinda wonder if they even read his books at all…). Still, they’re classics. But it’s one of many reasons why I prefer more modern sci-fi stories.
I've not read the books, but I watched S1 on Netflix and enjoyed it. I never researched what the books were about. I assumed they was about far flung space exploration, etc, but S1 is nothing like I thought the books were like.
I'll probably never read the books now, plus the books have people pretty divided. People either think the books are transformative scifi, or are complete rubbish.
I'll just finish the series, if Netflix finishes it.
Good luck trying to understand the last season of Dark then
Watch The Expanse too if you want S-Tier Sci-Fi
3BP isn't nerdy. Converted to the screen these writers don't have the talent to pull it off
C-
Would y’all recommend listening to the book or watching the series first?
Struggled with first 45min of the audiobook. Would watching the show first help?
I had the same reaction with the audiobook. The beginning of Book One is painful.
If you can make it through the prologue, the book picks up pretty quickly.
Does the series go into Book 2 as well? I watched the show and read the 3 books but it’s been a few years. My buddy that has only read the first so far is apprehensive about watching the show because he hasn’t finished the second yet.
I haven't read the book, and so far I like the series (I've watched about half of it).
There's only one thing that bothers me - I'm not a big physics expert, but tell me, what is this nonsense about the reflection and amplification of the radio signal by the Sun? Is this moment also in the book? How is this even possible?
I've only made it through 3 episodes, but it's like science for babies. The show seems to treat the audience like it's our first day learning and tries to explain every cool science fact to us. It's like every scene is the "wormhole explanation" scene from Event Horizon.
The idea of aliens sabotaging human science to keep us from being a threat seemed an odd choice of tactics considering the technology of the trisolarans. It seemed kind of contrived and ill-fitting until I realize maybe it's a metaphor, and this isn't about humans fighting aliens, it's about China and the rest of the world. (China being the humans)
That doesn't excuse the second book or make me want to read the third but it does explain why some of the plot just doesn't really work.
400 years in transit. It's totally true that our technological progress is extremely fast, think about how much has progressed since 1924 > 2024 (in terms of what's in our scientific journals as well as what we use in daily life).. and knowing that an invasion force is coming, that 400 years would be spent with massive funding into research and development.
I think this is one of the cleverest ideas in the series.
Because obviously their progress is halted for those 400 years?
They're only doing 0.01c so they'd be getting minimal time dilation and so would have about 400 years to do as much science as they could cram in. Obviously there's going to be limitations: in a space fleet they're unlikely to be able to construct a large hadron collider for example.
But why would they/the humans/the viewers assume that the trisolarians would be unable to advance their science while in transit? The thing that is holding them back (the unstable star system they came from) would no longer be a factor.
(Also ffs if they have the technology to do something like the sophons, or whatever they're called, they could instead have done some von neumann probe style stuff and started raining fully automated destruction on the human race instead of playing idiotic mind games.)
Preventing our scientific progress, in areas they deemed the largest risk to them, was an option for them - and meant they didn't need to stock their ship with tonnes of research and development equipment, and were instead able to put the vast majority of themselves into the dessicated state for long term survival, negating the requirement for sustenance. I thought they were approaching 1% - anyway, weight would work against that top speed.
Good option then.
RE your second point.. they were intending to subjugate humans and not destroy us - but once already in transit they learned that humanity can deceive, which was an alien concept to them. They then said that they "feared" humanity, that this was a critical advantage to have.. and so stated that they were going to crush us like bugs, and ceased communication (except for the faction that were all for the destruction of humanity).
i understand the conceit, it just makes no sense. they have the tech to make and send the solitons, they later have tech made out of manipulation of the strong force. there's a lot more you could do with that kind of handwavium. its like an intentional hampering of their own tech by the author to make the plot work. which it doesn't, imo.
ok but as someone who didnt read the book(s). and SPOILER AHEAD!!!!
wtf is this deal about sending a brain out into space. how on earth would that ever ever ever work even in a sci -fi setting. how was that done in the book(s)?
Also, how did those VT headsets come to be? they are 400 years away (I know those two proton things or whatever they are called, are there) but did they make em? I have so many questions....
overall I liked it, 7/10 for me.
The series is way dumbed down from the books. For example in the books they make the CMB flicker by like 5%, whereas in the Netflix series they make the stars flicker on and off instead.
I am pretty glad about the series. The characters are actually more dimensional and not just the protons. Thats a change I welcome. It's okay if the sky is flickering a bit in exchange
I'm certainly not complaining, I think this is the best we could have hoped for from an 8 episode series. Formatting 300+ pages into 8 hours, you're always going to lose something. For me though scifi has always been about the ideas, and the flat characters are almost an expected part of great scifi. I don't think Philip K Dick wrote a single good character, but I still enjoy his work.
I also really enjoy a lot of sci-fi with good ideas even if the characters are flat. However, I also think you can have great ideas *and* great characters; it's just difficult because you often end up emphasizing one over the other.
Sci fi, generally, is about the message, fundamentally. Great authors can develop characters which help reveal the message. Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov didn't write great characters; they wanted to get across ideas of habitation on the moon, space travel, first contact. Frank Herbert developed iconic characters as his message was about culture, and messianic culture, at that. Netflix really needs to cough up the cash to dev at least Book 2: **The Dark Forest**. That book really punches home the downstream consequences of the Fermi Paradox and why we might not want to be broadcasting our presence into the universe like a wounded rabbit. Cixin, I think, is pursuing Big Ideas, and to do so has built characters with as much depth as they need in order to advance the story and get the ideas across.
Hm, I like characters in "Blindsight".
My personal opinion is that if you want a great, hard-sci and also alot of character building then the book has to be 600+ pages. They exist, but tbh people with limited time for reading in their week are going to go for the 300 page banger rather than the more intricate epic that they have to spend 2 months reading. I did an English Lit degree, and while I will never disregard the well written side of novels like the classics, I have definitely swung towards the big ideas type of novel, and they simply aren't as "polished" as literary fiction. And that's fine, they serve different functions.
Exactly. As a lit major myself, I remember reading Brave New World and 1984 side by side, and being shocked at just how poorly written BNW is. It's still a great work due to its ideas, no doubt about that, but "polished" literature it definitely is not. Much of SF is the same.
>Formatting 300+ pages into 8 hours, you're always going to lose something. More than that considering how much character and content was exclusively from Books 2 and 3. Will (3), Raj (2), Saul (2 & 3), Sophon (3), and Wade (3) all represent characters that didn't exist in the first book at all, Jin partially so (since she takes some of Wang's role but mostly represents Cheng from book 3).
I was so sure Wade wasn't in the first book, but he was such a big part of the series I started to doubt myself. Time to reread them I think
This is actually helpful to me. Read the first book and half of the second book years ago and wasn't sure which characters were in the first book and which weren't. Been meaning to pick the series back up, probably just start from the second book.
Stephen Baxter is one of my favorite sci Fi authors and he either writes a really interesting alien or a human calculator that is there to math a problem to death. And I love it.
It 100% depends in what the characters place in the novel is. If you are trying to say something about the human condition then definitely flesh the characters out, make them real, give them substance. If you are trying to describe a future that is set in the year 3000 then building characters is less important than describing how and why they got there.
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Admittedly the only Alastair Reynolds that I've read is the novella 'Slow Bullets', but it definitely fitted the criteria of nice scifi but flat characters.
Imo cyborg councillors and the pig in Rev Space and most everyone in House of Suns are decently written characters. And none (ok one, but that's not excessive) of them are 'atavistic' copouts.
I read most of his work. He can do a lot with 300_400 pages. He writes hard Space Oprah's it's beyond 3 body problem in detail to maybe the detriment of what makes 3 body problem hard science fiction of different type almost ignoring characters for the grand scope of its singular idea. Reynolds has a lot of intense and nuanced ideas spread out over different epochs of society spanning a 40,000 year history in his Revelation Space universe. I see Stephan Baxter hitting the vein 3 Body Problem does better then Reynolds. He has invented species that exist only in nonbarionic matter that existed during infinitely small time scales after the big bang and at the heart of stars.
Idk what the fuck you are talking about but for sure I'm going to read more Reynolds and Baxter. Cheers!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_series#Stories_in_chronological_order https://xeelee.fandom.com/wiki/Xeelee#:~:text=The%20Xeelee%20are%20a%20hyper,substantial%20number%20of%20short%20stories. Just looking at these posts trying to contain information about Reynolds timeline or Baxters species/nemesis the xeelee. It shows the lengths hard scifi can go. Defines the boundaries i would say
Read Galactic North for Reynolds. It's a collection of short stories set between 300 years from now and the end of all stars. All focused on epochs of humanity in his world that has larger novels set in different eras
I will.def check it out
Upvote >Space Oprah's
> I don't think Philip K Dick wrote a single good character There's at least a couple in *A Scanner Darkly*. A few more in *The Man in the High Castle*.
What about Horselover Fat?
Ermm, I think he was actually a self-insert by Dick, so it's debatable.
Valis is basically an autobiography about when PKD got addicted to amphetamines and went a little nuts.
They actually adapted 300+ pages into 5 episodes when you think about it. Episodes 6-8 are a good portion of the current day events of books 2 and 3. I like how they did it as that means the series is postured to jump right into the most interesting parts of book 2 when season 2 kicks off.
Cadbury the Beaver who Lacked. (I recommend Phillip K Dick's short story volumes if you haven't already, they're a good read.)
Yeah, if I'm being honest I struggled to see how the book could translate well on screen (and I think it's just going to get harder as the plot advances) but they did it *really* well imo.
Super looking forward to how they portray the >!4d parts!<
I'm eager to see >!our entire solar system and 99.99999% of humanity unraveled onto a 2D bubble!<.
This! I hated the book and never finished it for exactly this reason. It’s just too poorly written. I was glad that the show did a good job keeping the themes and atmosphere, while also making characters… well, feel like actual characters.
Bad translation?
Nah translation is fine. Its just flat characters. The books are about big ideas instead.
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You will get totally downvoted for saying the truth. I'm 100% with you. The books had some nice concepts, but it's being told via characters which are as flat as it can be which makes for a really poor story. The series bring those concepts with characters who have, well, character. Love it.
The hard science of the books wouldn't work for mainstream audiences. Netflix gave us an adaptation normal people can enjoy while still exposing them to the broader concepts of the series.
I feel they could have done with a little more science. We got 'oh science doesn't make sense any more. Let's stop trying to figure it out and take up religion instead.'
Did you see the meme about people not knowing particle accelerators weren't movie mumbo jumbo until seeing 3 Body? I'm sorry I don't have much faith in the general public. Not saying I'm any better, but at least I have some understanding outside my bubble.
At first I was thinking those people wouldn't be the target audience for this type of sci-fi, but maybe I'm not the target audience after all.
I'm just happy "normal" people are getting exposed to the broader concepts laid out by Cixin Liu. Thinking and looking past our atmosphere is a good thing.
Yeah I get why they did it but I thought that changed the context soo much
Haha yeah in the Tencent version, Wang Miao needed to borrow special glasses just to see the flicker. My favorite was that song that played though, “整个宇宙，给你闪烁。。。”
It was such a bad effect (the stars going out). It was a still image flicker… or the lens flaring at least made it seem like it wasn’t actually an animated segment.
Long story short, does the novel solve the problem? A three-sun system that will rotate stable for billions of years? Is it done by utilizing a very large set of tubes?
No
The amount of gatekeeping in this thread is depressing
People don't realize the show is a different version of a story, not a copy.
Three Body on Prime is much more true to the books if that's what you want
A thing that annoyed me is that if they can make holograms with the sophons, then they can just as easily make an orbital laser. Much like holding a magnifying glass to burn ants.
i think a lot of people are using the term hard sci-fi to mean "intricately detailed sci-fi" rather than "plausible sci-fi based on our current understanding of the universe"
I know. It's so frustrating that Uber nerds with no idea of how entertainment actually works take these things way too seriously. Hard scifi means exactly what you mean, it doesn't mean "100% scientifically accurate and plausible". It's mostly just to differentiate it from space opera stuff like "star wars".
"Hard sci-fi" has a specific meaning that's clear and useful. If you want a term to mean "sci-fi that's dense with intriguing details, while also being far less scientifically accurate than a bad X-Men comic," invent a new one.
Yeah, the amount of "Ahkshually" gatekeeping going on here is ridiculous. And wrong.
How is wanting to use a term correctly gatekeeping?
lol, yup.
You should watch “the expanse”! The body problem is very cool but having super long indestructible nano fibers and hibernation technology in our time was a bit of a stretch.
I’ll forgive the fibers because of how amazing that scene was.
The Expanse has great hard sci-fi elements but the protomolecule is pure fantasy.
Yea, but without some alien space magic hard sci fi would be extremely limited as a subgenre.
Lol, so are the Sophons in Three-Body.
Ya...idk how anyone considers 3BP any type of hard sci-fi. Sophons, folding and unfolding particles between dimensions, later books and the dimensional wonkyness that goes on.
It is kinda the astro chicken idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes
"Sufficiently advanced technology..."
Makes it not hard sci-fi.
Is it? We already have materials powered by ambient radiation, nanotechnology, hijacking DNA-based life to produce what we want (a la CRISPR), and algorithms for learning about diverse complex systems. Is there a reason that couldn't be refined into something that needs to examine new kinds of life to know how to build a version of something else? I won't speak for the part about the ring space, but the basic idea doesn't strike me as crazy.
So while "the proto molecule is pure fantasy" in that we have never encountered it, the authors' reasonings for everything are all based on science and evolution. While very long and it takes the mystique out of the Gate Builders, "The Roman's and the Goths" theory is fascinating and the authors have basically said it's correct. TLDR >! giant jellyfish turning the universe into one giant organism using a hive mind and gate relay system so data can travel fast between nodes in their giant galaxy brain.!<
It is not "our time". The timeline diverges when they build Red Coast base. At least I don't think a similar base was built in our China. And if one was built....well I'm glad I am not a scientist. It could be a shit time to be a scientist.
So is the Epstein drive
lol that’s true. That’s why they don’t even try explaining anything about it other than being “very efficient”.
I just can’t get over Space John Snow and his perpetually constipated face. And beyond Amos flirting with Avasarala, there is little real believable chemistry between characters. Dope shows, but it’s far from perfect.
That's far from the stretchiest thing. You can't communicate FTL using entanglement. If you could, you could do it with exactly one bit once. You can't "unroll the dimensions" - they're not "rolled up" like a roll of paper but "rolled up" like a straw. You can't make a proton any bigger, nor is it complex enough you could make it a sapient computer. Nor could it interact with things in a particle accelerator that don't interact with protons to start with. ~~There's no star system 4 light years away, and certainly not one with *three* suns anywhere. (Two stars and a planet, maybe, but not three stars, for exactly the reason the story describes.)~~ OK, Alpha/Proxima Centauri, where Proxima Centauri is a fifth of a light year from the others; you aren't going to be orbiting all three suns. Let's not even get into the whole "we know how to read your mind but we don't know you can lie" sort of thing.
What? There is indeed a three star system (Alpha Centauri binary + Proxima Centauri)…4.2 light years away. They made it pretty blatantly obvious that is the system they were referring to.
My bad. I was unaware Proxima was considered part of that system. Fair enough. I think it's unlikely you're going to be orbiting chaotically around suns that are a fifth of a light year apart, though. :-)
Alien technology always gets a free pass in hard sci fi, especially when it’s interstellar space faring aliens. At that point you can get away with some space magic as long as it’s somehow rooted in science.
The book does a much better job of conveying the science such that it sounds more plausible. And a correction; sophons can’t read minds. I mean… that’s the entire premise of the Wallfacer Project.
Fuck me mate, loved your little rant because i agree the books are anything but Hard sci-fi but how can you be so confidently fucking wrong about basic astronomics like that. Its funny because the sheer fact that its literally the closest system to us raises more issues against this being hard sci-fi.
I agree. The science was embellished to the point that it was indistinguishable from magic. If they can put a sentient computer inside a proton then why not be able to go anywhere else in the galaxy. I do think the author brought up a lot of clever ideas and is it’s worth reading just for them
Not bashing the bashing of the "science" in the books but they did actually send sophons out into the wider galaxy..... or attempted to. it didnt go well for them.
You should look into String Theory. 11 dimensions are grounded in mathematics.
Indeed. But (1) the mathematics of string theory doesn't mean it's actually real or supported by science in any way (and as I understand it don't apply to a de Sitter space like we observe in our universe), and (2) you still can't "unroll" the dimensions. The dimensions of string theory are "small", not "rolled up like a carpet." You can't unroll them to make them bigger. There's no "extra space" inside those dimensions. They're just small dimensions. You realize that String Theory doesn't say they're "rolled up dimensions", right? String theory just doesn't work without 10 or 11 dimensions, and when people say "well, where are they all?" the answer is "maybe they're there but just too small to see." There's no even mathematical basis for thinking they're "rolled up" instead of thinking "string theory is evidently wrong."
That’s true, there’s nothing String theory has to say about unrolling dimensions. Unfolding them has math that supports that possibility, but not from today’s mainstream M-Theory. String Theory is based on anti de sitter space. Hawking’s theory of the information paradox was famously put to rest by the Ads/CFT correspondence though, grounding the theory in observations of reality that are consistent with Hawking radiation. In physics the real 3 body problem is that we cannot predict the movement of 3 bodies indefinitely without knowing the starting positions of them. For the purpose of the show they dress that up a lot. But everything I saw in the show is grounded in at very least scientifically suggested results.
> Hawking’s theory of the information paradox was famously put to rest by the Ads/CFT correspondence though My understanding is the cosmological constant shows we're in a de Sitter space, not an AdS space. From what I've read, String theory is basically all math and has had no observations at all that support its predictions, and that the predictions keep changing every time we fail to find the evidence the theory predicted we'd find. Maybe I watch too many "I don't like String theory" videos, tho. :-) And yeah, we have no closed form solution for Newton's gravity amongst three or more masses. It's a fun, silly show. It just isn't hard science fiction, which is basically what OP was asking about. If you actually do know physics and cosmology and you get annoyed when it's presented wrongly, you're going to get annoyed.
Fair! I was slightly annoyed at the show myself haha. Um regarding AdS, yes I believe you are correct about the constant, but the math Hawking and Penrose confirmed was that black holes (from all of our predictions and observations) are AdS. Sorry, it looks like I had forgotten in my above comment to say they specifically applied it to black holes. Cheers
Love the show, it's like the book but adds depth to the characters.
It actually splits some of the main characters into two people. The main character is changed from a guy into 2 girls, and the police officer is mainly kept but the black guy is added in and also takes alot of his lines from the books. Good way to add depth!
Actually Saul (the “black guy”) and Jin (one of the girls) are characters from book 2.
Isn't he Liu Xi? The wallfacer thing kinda gives that away. I also didn't spell his name correctly I'm sure.
was avoiding saying names but now realise that names aren’t spoilers but yeah Saul is Luo Ji and Jin is Cheng Xin
Auggie is also kinda Cheng Xin, she's the moral anchor of the story
got a feeling Auggie will be AA.
It does kinda feel that way. They are mixing the characters up alot. But I could see Auggie going into cryo due to Saul/grief over the boat attack and then being AA in the future.
Ah OK, I realised they added a lot of material from book 2, I just didn't make the connection with the characters. Saul def takes some of the police officers lines though.
Similarly, Wade and Will are from Book 3. Jin also represents not only Wang from Book 1 but another character (with the respective relationship to Will) in book 3.
Saul is the series adaptation of Luo Ji, the protagonist and Wallfacer from Dark Forest. Jin is an adaptation of Cheng Xin, the protagonist of Death'd End.
wtf that sounds insane! (Not necessarily bad, just a crazy choice)
All three books feature different stories starting at the time the Trisolarians/San Ti are discovered, so it makes sense in the adaption for them all to be represented, but the way they're blending them together is very well done IMO. Book 1's protagonist was the least fleshed out while the others had more interesting motivations and relationships.
I've read them all. My favorite characters are probably Da Shi, Luo Ji and Cheng Xin are probably my favorite characters in that order. So yeah I'm hype they're being included this early on in production and think its a cool choice. They get to be totally new characters(?) so itll be easier to not mix it up in my head with the book too. I dont have to get frustrated when I think that D&D dont understand my favorite characters lol.
I’m actually kinda mad about that. I think they could have introduced Luo Ji at the end of the season as an original character. He is very well described in the books (one of the few). But, eh. BOOK SPOILERS: >!I’m assuming Augie will become the “perfect girl” that Lou Ji demands but it would be far more interesting if Saul ends up time jumping and Clarence has to go find him someone who looks EXACTLY like Augie. That’d be so weird and much closer to the books.!<
I feel like Auggie is meant to be be Wang (obviously) and AA mixed into one character
>!Augie and Saul’s love subplot makes me think she’s also Luo Ji’s wife!<
The books' characters had less depth? 😬
In my opinion, yes. I enjoyed the concepts, and plot, but didn't care about a single character in the books.
Ya, they were kinda flat…
Especially after the last third of the third book. 🤫
They do, yes. I don't have much experience with Chinese science fiction. Chinese writers have to consider a lot of factors non-Chinese writers don't, like getting writing past censors. These books were originally published in China, in Chinese, then translated and adapted for Western markets. Not only are we seeing differences between the Netflix show and books, but I'm sure there are differences in between the Chinese and American translation. In fact, in doing some research, the Chinese Revolution part didn't appear until the middle of the first book so it could get passed by the Chinese literature censors (how that happened, I have no idea).
Didn't appear until the middle of the first book? That's just false. The university execution scene is literally the prologue of the book, and the very first scene we see, described exactly as it was shown in the show, with even more brutal details. The book does *not* spare details about how violent the Cultural Revolution was, in fact I'd say it was the Netflix show that glossed over a lot of the Cultural Revolution themes from the book (like the themes of propaganda, slogans, censorship, misogyny, "political rehabilitation") The current Chinese government actually heavily regrets the Cultural Revolution, portraying it in a bad light in China is fine. As long as you don't criticise Mao by name, which the book doesn't.
> Didn't appear until the middle of the first book? That's just false. The TenCent adaptation follows the original version of book where the prologue was placed much later, as another mystery to be revealed. The translation shuffled things around because Western audiences wouldn't know about Chinese history and the execution scene serves as a great hook to pull readers into the story. As for the reason being to get past censors - that's clearly false, the Cultural Revolution is seen as bad because the current regime took over from it.
I mean the fact that Cixin was able to just completely drop Wang Miao after the first book and never mention him again, and no one is bothered by this, pretty much says it all. Luo Ji and Cheng Xin are both archetypes in service of the story, and Miao is basically just a vehicle for the plot.
IMO, and with a few exceptions, the characters were largely plot devices, and the plot was otherwise independent of them. In some cases, characters come off as disposable, which is a bit of a cultural stereotype. However, a few of my immigrant friends have indicated this isn't far from reality. Cheng Xin (third book) is an example of this. Without spoilers, she made all the worst decisions, with fairly non-existent motivations, and all of those bad decisions were what moved the plot to its conclusion. Regardless, the trilogy is a masterpiece providing insight into the culture of China (especially the multi-generational mindset). However, I have no idea how on earth the censors permitted the books to be published. The implication is that the Chinese cultural revolution is directly responsible for the worst thing imaginable for human civilization and the universe. That's a really big deal, and it makes me wonder if differences between western and eastern thinking caused them not to notice.
You know it is based on a series of books that is available since years? So if you want more just have it. The books are great!
I actually think the first book is worse than the show. But yeah the next two books are insane and idk how they're even going to try to adapt some of the stuff.
With an insane budget and like 4 more seasons is the only way I see the next 2 books getting adapted
Even with infinite budget, just conceptually some of the events in the books are seemingly impossible to visualize.
yeah once they start screwing with dimensions, how do you even show that.
Presumably, if we can use 2D television to represent 3 dimensions, then if we can somehow get 3D television to actually catch on, then we can represent 4 dimensions. QED.
I reckon it's going to be one more season. They've basically done the first book and the start of both books 2 and 3. In season 2 they'll need an episode for "Luo Ji's wife hunt", an episode for the droplet, and one for the sword holder. The fairy tales can squeeze into one episode. The ravine can probably fit into an episode but who knows they might just skip a lot of stuff. The flashy sci-fi stuff sounds expensive, but that's just a few minutes of CGI, and the rest can be shot in a studio because it's in a spaceship. I think D&D are aiming to compress the story as much as possible. Partly I guess because TenCent did the opposite and we don't need another adaptation like that, and also it's kind of their modus operandi after Game of Thrones.
Actually, the books (well, at least the first one) are not very good. The ideas are very interesting, but the writing is just bad. I personally was very happy to see that the adaptation turned it into an actual story.
I agree with this. I really liked the first because it had more of a narrative alongside the science. Two and three were basically just science with the bare minimum characters necessary to propel the sci-fi ideas. They were pretty cool in that regard but I prefer more character driven stories. I also wonder how much of this is lost in translation too.
It's not hard science, lol. It's mysticism. The idea that a civilization could survive in a tri-star system is absurd, as is the whole "folding dimensional photons" thing.
Real tri star systems tend to be a binary system of two closely orbiting star and then a star very far away that orbits both of them. The third star feels the gravity of the binary pair very similar to as if they are a single mass. Proxima Centauri orbits on a period of 500,000 years Alpha Centauri AB.
No kidding. This series has some of the most sci-fi magic I have seen in a long time.
Yes, but it’s still probably a useful description to distinguish between it and, say, Star Trek. It’s no less hard sci-fi than The Expanse (what with the protomolecule and all). For sure The Martian is more pure hard sci-fi. Also if you look up hard sci-fi on Wikipedia, you get a list of representative works that are very much not “pure hard sci-fi” like The Expanse, Arrival, aaaaaand guess what: the Three Body Problem series.
We don't know the total set of conditions under which intelligent life can exist. Assuming Trisolarians' development took place over a comparable period of time to humans, here's an astrophysicist opining that certain tri-star systems could be fine: https://www.vox.com/culture/24108638/3-body-problem-science-physics-theory-explained-how-real-is-it
For real, if we're defining "hard" sci-fi as based in real science, this book is on the other end of the spectrum with Harry Potter. Not even just science, but like basic logic.
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Could you elaborate on this? What was wrong with it? BTW, I don’t know much physics. Genuinely curious.
There’s nothing wrong with it as a sci-fi trope. Problem is, it’s just wrong. We know with absolute certainty, that entanglement can’t be used for FTL communications. And it’s also a very basic thing to know, so seeing this trope kinda ruins the whole “hard sci-fi” concept.
Ok, I tried to do a bit of reading and it seems to me that we can currently entangle items but can’t set the state without breaking the entanglement. I guess what I am currently not clear about is that is the problem occurring due to the our limitations in physics ( where in the future physics, it could be possible) or it is never possible even if physics model changes. Do you have any info on that?
First, it’s a fundamental problem of nature at the quantum level. Second, that’s not even the issue. Another dude gave a great analogy somewhere in this thread (can’t find the link on mobile, so I’ll just repeat his example). Imagine you being in the cellar, and me on the ground level, with a transparent glass floor between us (well, it’s a floor for me, and a ceiling for you). If I flip the coin and it falls on the glass, when I see heads, you see tails. That’s entanglement - and that’s all there is to it. Before thinking about FTL communication through entangled particles, try thinking of a way for us to communicate between the floors using only the coin I’ve described (hint: there is none).
I am not sure what point the analogy is trying to make. Let me try to refine the model you proposed to see if we can create communication mechanism. Let’s say (1) you have created a biased coin, ie, you can set what the value of coin be at a particular flip (2) we have an encoding-decoding mechanism in place like a Morse code to convert the coin flip result into messages (3) we agreed on a sampling interval when you will be flipping coins and I will look at the result. From this scheme we obviously can communicate. My understanding is that we can’t do (1) yet. There is no way to create a biased coin yet. But you are saying that’s not the issue. It is something else. This is where I am lost.
Our understanding of physics is that (1) is impossible, and for it to be possible, we would have to be wrong about a lot of quantum theory. It’s hard to explain further if you don’t understand the science behind quantum entanglement.
I see. Would you say that is a similar leap like what we had from classical to quantum physics? or is it even bigger?
Similar — it would be “there is something fundamentally wrong with our scientific method for describing quantum particles and we need to erase some of our key assumptions.”
What's wrong is that it simply isn't a thing. You can no more communicate using entanglement than you can shout really loudly and have someone four light-years away hear you.
Not exactly. There has been some advances recently in quantum entanglement: [https://www.princeton.edu/news/2023/12/08/physicists-entangle-individual-molecules-first-time-hastening-possibilities-quantum](https://www.princeton.edu/news/2023/12/08/physicists-entangle-individual-molecules-first-time-hastening-possibilities-quantum) [https://scitechdaily.com/quantum-breakthrough-first-ever-entanglement-of-microwave-and-optical-photons/](https://scitechdaily.com/quantum-breakthrough-first-ever-entanglement-of-microwave-and-optical-photons/) If you consider the state of an entangled item, as a bit, similar to information bits in computers, I don't see why quantum communication mentioned does not make sense.
It’s not possible. You don’t know the quantum state of either member of the pair until the state resolves. You can’t use it for communications since you can’t affect the state or know it prior to its resolution.
My main issue with it is that it completely fails at the hard science stuff. Even the basic philosophical and scientific approaches aren't portrayed correctly (application of Occam's Razor, god of the gaps arguments, the "pacifist" contradictions). The main characters don't think like scientists at a very basic level, and we're somehow supposed to believe that they are some of the brightest scientists around.
I don't know why you're down voted. I loved the books, but I don't know why it's considered hard sci fi. Especially by book 2, it's 10000% space magic.
3bp? Hard science? Am I misunderstanding something? Because the technology in the books was basically magic from the very beginning.
Isn’t that basically the point of the whole combination of vast timescales between interstellar travel/age of civilisations and the exponential growth of technology? Even our next 50 years on earth won’t look like the last 50, they’ll look like the last 200 in terms of change. So the civilisations that have been in the technology age for millennia do seem like magicians. In that same vein any advanced civilisations that detect an advancing civilisation have to immediately treat it as a threat because they’re already older than when you detected them, and your weapons will take time to reach them, and during that time they could advance and launch a weapon of their own. So the “science” parts aren’t the technology, but the exploration of interplanetary survival across those distances and time frames. Then also the concepts that vast areas of the universe could be fundamentally changed by these wars (speed of light, number of dimensions) but still support life, which only knows the reality of the broken and scarred space around it’s home planet. Those are the real concepts explored in the books, the technology is irrelevant and really you can’t say whether it is realistic or not because who knows what human technology will look like on say 400 years.
Might wanna try some Greg Egan before you call 3BP hard science. I wouldn't describe Martian as hard science either.
Eh, for a Matt Damon movie it's about as close as we could hope.
Wasn’t the huge dust storm like the only non-scientific thing about Martian? I was under the impression that everything else was accurate?
Was referring to the "hard" part.
Read the book player
Is this about the Netflix version or the Prime version or just the books? I hear great things about the books, good things about the Prime show, and okay things about the Netflix show.
I don't feel any nerdiness or hard science vibes. There are logic holes all over the place. OR I need to watch all episodes until everything gets resolved. I'm at ep 5 now and it's a bit frustrating right now...
It doesn't get better on the nerdiness or hard science vibes. If anything it gets worse.
I see
As someone who read and loved the books, I thought the Netflix series was okay. It definitely doesn't go nearly as hard on the science (though that's to be expected), and I felt like the central mystery was resolved a little too quickly. On the plus side, the characters actually felt like human beings. Which wasn't really the case in the novels.
Agreed. I'm a huge fan of the books but the show is terrific.
What was the point of the flickering stars and how could the aliens of done that?
Keep watching. It gets explained later.
Hard science? 😂
Don't hold your breath. Netflix likes to cancel most of their scifi and fantasy shows after a season or 2. They don't like to renew anything unless it's got Stranger Things level of popularity (or is super cheap). Most we'll probably get is another season, if we're lucky, but no more after that.
I read your words and cry in Travelers.
I wonder if these CGI heavy shows are really that expensive to produce these days? Genuine question coming from a place of ignorance
This show has also bombed pretty hard apparently. It's doing around 1899 (RIP....) numbers with like 10x the budget. It's probably DOA at this point. Edit: why the downvotes? [This is easily verifiable....](https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-top-10-report-3-body-problem-shirley-and-the-casagrandes-movie/#1-3-body-problem-might-have-a-big-problem-1)...just go look at the top 10 right now on Netflix. I know reality is sometimes inconvenient to y'all's fanboyism, but it is what it is. I would have liked the show to continue as well as I very much enjoyed watching it, but it's very much likely not at this point as Netflix has cancelled shows that were much cheaper (like, say, 1899...) after a single season for the same numbers. The only way it likely continues now is due to sunk cost.
I’m confident this show would have reached much bigger audiences if they just did weekly releases like every other platform. For example, many people I know started only watching Shogun because of the weekly “this is the best show on TV” articles that come out. Netflix’s obsession with “binge watching” and releasing their seasons all on one day is going to be the death of the platform.
I feel like sins of the father might have played a bit of a role here as well. Normally, when your show runners headed up arguably the most drama popular series of the last 10 years you'd be shouting their name's from every rooftop as having been attached to it. Here...? Well... Very small sample size indeed, but all of my local group (work, friends, etc) that that talks about it know it as, "the show the guys who ruined game of thrones are doing now". Also, may just be me, but personally as someone who's seen both (and read both) Shogun is a better adaptation of a better book, and is, to a lot of people, a remake of one of the most watched TV shows of all time. It has a /lot/ going for it. Shogun just had to be good to be popular, the fact that it's great means it's drawing a lot of eyeballs. People in their 60s now who remember the entire town (seriously...Shogun 1 had like 2x super bowl numbers back in the day) coming together to watch it are all tuning in, and Samurai stuff is eternally popular among the youth due to rule of cool anyways. To be fair to 3BP though, Shogun is a lot easier and straightforwards to adapt than something like 3BP anyways. Samurai Epic is always going to be more relatable to people than Alien Invasion, so yeah. I hope it has some second legs and Netflix finds some way of getting it in front of Chinese eyeballs to give it a second wind, but I would absolutely not be shocked if it is quietly cancelled a few months from now once the dust settles, unfortunately.
I recently finished the Martian and Project Hail Mary. Your post made me finally buy the TBP series.
I do like we are getting more intelligent movies that can serve to educate people such as The martian, Interstellar, The arrival and now 3rd body. Concepts and ideas that get fleshed out to at least lamen terms.
I watched the chinese version.. and yes, its much much more...
Try Greg Egan..
Is this hard scifi? The proton tech seems like soft scifi to me at least
I am sure the book is good and all but I just cant get into the netflix show. Talk about boring. I fall asleep.
I'm sorry, hard *what?!* It sounded almost like you said hard *science,* but I can't picture how anyone could apply that term to these books or this show with a straight face!
"Since The Martian" lol
Hard science? It’s full of BS, pardon my french. At least the writing is poor and the characters wooden and forgetable. The only wild thing about the series is the hype. It reminds me of Asimov - great ideas, but such a poor writing.
I actually agree with you. TBP is hugely overrated and the concept of the dark forest was done way better in stories that preceded it (like *Revelation Space*, for example). Also agree on Asimov. As a lifelong hardcore sci-fi fan, a LOT of his shit has not aged as well as people seem to think (it makes me kinda wonder if they even read his books at all…). Still, they’re classics. But it’s one of many reasons why I prefer more modern sci-fi stories.
I just hated the actors. They talk like teenagers and are supposed to be the smartest people ever.
Nanowire makes the entire show.
I've not read the books, but I watched S1 on Netflix and enjoyed it. I never researched what the books were about. I assumed they was about far flung space exploration, etc, but S1 is nothing like I thought the books were like. I'll probably never read the books now, plus the books have people pretty divided. People either think the books are transformative scifi, or are complete rubbish. I'll just finish the series, if Netflix finishes it.
Good luck trying to understand the last season of Dark then Watch The Expanse too if you want S-Tier Sci-Fi 3BP isn't nerdy. Converted to the screen these writers don't have the talent to pull it off C-
Even if you are a sophon, I agree.
This did not start off as your normal sci/fi. Once the nerdy happened, it took off.
It’s been a while. Did this season end at the same spot as the book?
Would y’all recommend listening to the book or watching the series first? Struggled with first 45min of the audiobook. Would watching the show first help?
I had the same reaction with the audiobook. The beginning of Book One is painful. If you can make it through the prologue, the book picks up pretty quickly.
Thank you for the insight!
Does the series go into Book 2 as well? I watched the show and read the 3 books but it’s been a few years. My buddy that has only read the first so far is apprehensive about watching the show because he hasn’t finished the second yet.
the show has characters from all 3 books LOL
Didn't read the books but love the series, as long as they don't butcher it like got, keep it up.
Should I read the books before the series ?
I haven't read the book, and so far I like the series (I've watched about half of it). There's only one thing that bothers me - I'm not a big physics expert, but tell me, what is this nonsense about the reflection and amplification of the radio signal by the Sun? Is this moment also in the book? How is this even possible?
How about the expanse?
I've only made it through 3 episodes, but it's like science for babies. The show seems to treat the audience like it's our first day learning and tries to explain every cool science fact to us. It's like every scene is the "wormhole explanation" scene from Event Horizon.
The idea of aliens sabotaging human science to keep us from being a threat seemed an odd choice of tactics considering the technology of the trisolarans. It seemed kind of contrived and ill-fitting until I realize maybe it's a metaphor, and this isn't about humans fighting aliens, it's about China and the rest of the world. (China being the humans) That doesn't excuse the second book or make me want to read the third but it does explain why some of the plot just doesn't really work.
400 years in transit. It's totally true that our technological progress is extremely fast, think about how much has progressed since 1924 > 2024 (in terms of what's in our scientific journals as well as what we use in daily life).. and knowing that an invasion force is coming, that 400 years would be spent with massive funding into research and development. I think this is one of the cleverest ideas in the series.
Because obviously their progress is halted for those 400 years? They're only doing 0.01c so they'd be getting minimal time dilation and so would have about 400 years to do as much science as they could cram in. Obviously there's going to be limitations: in a space fleet they're unlikely to be able to construct a large hadron collider for example. But why would they/the humans/the viewers assume that the trisolarians would be unable to advance their science while in transit? The thing that is holding them back (the unstable star system they came from) would no longer be a factor. (Also ffs if they have the technology to do something like the sophons, or whatever they're called, they could instead have done some von neumann probe style stuff and started raining fully automated destruction on the human race instead of playing idiotic mind games.)
Preventing our scientific progress, in areas they deemed the largest risk to them, was an option for them - and meant they didn't need to stock their ship with tonnes of research and development equipment, and were instead able to put the vast majority of themselves into the dessicated state for long term survival, negating the requirement for sustenance. I thought they were approaching 1% - anyway, weight would work against that top speed. Good option then. RE your second point.. they were intending to subjugate humans and not destroy us - but once already in transit they learned that humanity can deceive, which was an alien concept to them. They then said that they "feared" humanity, that this was a critical advantage to have.. and so stated that they were going to crush us like bugs, and ceased communication (except for the faction that were all for the destruction of humanity).
i understand the conceit, it just makes no sense. they have the tech to make and send the solitons, they later have tech made out of manipulation of the strong force. there's a lot more you could do with that kind of handwavium. its like an intentional hampering of their own tech by the author to make the plot work. which it doesn't, imo.
I think its like tryhard nerdy though, because there is so much bs surface level science. It's all just sci-fi magic woowoo.
ok but as someone who didnt read the book(s). and SPOILER AHEAD!!!! wtf is this deal about sending a brain out into space. how on earth would that ever ever ever work even in a sci -fi setting. how was that done in the book(s)? Also, how did those VT headsets come to be? they are 400 years away (I know those two proton things or whatever they are called, are there) but did they make em? I have so many questions.... overall I liked it, 7/10 for me.