Problematic

• Published date: 26 March 2024
• Publication title: Signal

WELL, hello again to Game of Thrones’ David “Unfilmable books a specialty!” Benioff and DB “Likewise!” Weiss! This time they are on Netflix, with an adaptation of the hardest of hard sci-fi tomes, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (the first in a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past). The eight-part series is near-named after the book as 3 Body Problem and opens with a truly harrowing scene of a Maoist struggle in which an eminent professor of physics, who has fallen foul of the Chinese Cultural revolutionaries for teaching the principles of Western science, is beaten to death on stage in front of his wife — who denounces him as he is killed — while his appalled daughter and protege, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), watches in the audience. One of the timelines follows her as she is sent first to a forced labour camp in Inner Mongolia and then, when her astrophysicist skills are needed, to a mysterious scientific project (lots of buttons, big satellite dish) on its outskirts

In the present day, particle accelerators around...