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Derek Tsang, Andrew Stanton, Minkie Spiro, and Jeremy Podeswa (directors), 3 Body Problem, 2024.

We all die. Being a problem-solving species, this fact leaves us uneasy.

The void—the little alien splinter—cannot be expunged. It cannot even be glimpsed. We can only interface with the beyond by proxy, and culture is the great generator of popular proxies. Nominally, I am writing for an earthly purpose—to review the Netflix and Tencent adaptations of Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem, which I’m going to argue together constitute a phenomenon intimately entangled with “the alien”—but first I want to lead you along a strange tangent: to Kong Dashan’s 2021 film Journey to the West (宇宙探索编辑部).

Meet Tang Laoshi
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Kong adopts a choppy mockumentary style to follow one Tang Zhijun, the bedraggled manager of a mangy Beijing space magazine, who undertakes a southwestern expedition following reports of a possible UFO incident in Sichuan. Note the disconnection between the film’s titles—the Chinese translates to “Universe Exploration Editorial Department”. Its posters consistently make use of both titles, so I’ll venture that they’re complementary—not merely an original and a translation. One hand fist-bumps the Monkey King and company, while the other salutes the scattered dreamers and fan(atic)s driving Chinese science fiction.

Besides questing from the urban Han core to its wild periphery, this Journey to the West is sprinkled with allusions to its classical namesake. Early on, Tang confides to the camera his view that the sensual pleasures of fine food and non-productive sex are best cast aside. In his eyes they’re barriers to (trans)human cultivation. Essentially, he’s telling us that he’s Tang Xuanzang, albeit a beaten-down incarnation who can’t afford to heat his own office.

At the film’s opening we see a tape recording of Tang the young editor in 1990, brimming with cheer as he expounds on how a certain early television broadcast is still travelling through space, and may yet trigger contact between humans and the marvellous people of a distant star. Perhaps it’s a nod to a certain fateful broadcast in The Three Body Problem. If not a nod, it is at least a line by which we might trace a constellation.

Strange Comrades
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Now let’s examine a fleshier piece of connective tissue between Journey to the West (JttW) and Three Body. Meet Frant Gwo (郭帆), marked out not only by his English(?) name but also by his director credits for The Wandering Earth 1 and 2—thus far the only feature length adaptations of a Liu Cixin story. Gwo served as an executive producer of JttW, and also cameos as the inadvertent financial backer of its in-world documentary (having arrived at Tang’s office to buy a spacesuit for his upcoming picture, The Wandering Ball 流浪的求, 哈哈哈).

Putting his peer in front of the camera is an endearing directorial choice because Kong and Gwo are at odds aesthetically. JttW’s jerky, lowkey depictions of real and unglamourous places—decrepit offices, dingy apartments, and damp rural backwaters—are dimensions-removed from Mr Gwo’s gleaming, patriotically-inclined studio productions. Kong’s characters are messy losers. Gwo’s characters are beautiful heroes. One with a penchant for poking at communist legacies might wish to dig up the old distinction between “social realism” and “socialist realism”. But let’s proceed.

Gwo’s presence serves as more than comradery. It’s another path in the constellation, linking the big business aspirations of Chinese sci-fi in the current moment and its print-media grassroots. For decades, from an era of obscurity to emergence on the world stage, the wellspring of Chinese sci-fi has been its magazines and the nerds who read and produce them. Science Fiction World 科幻世界 is the big fish, alive and swimming since 1979. Tang’s magazine, Universe Exploration 宇宙探索, is a plausible small fry: a labour of love slowly being killed off by failure to adapt to a changing ecosystem. (The film’s two settings also seem to play on this self-reflexive appeal to cultural production—Beijing and Sichuan are the two major centres of gravity.)

Inside the Dark Forest
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Tang Zhijun’s journey passes through Chengdu, then heads deep into the countryside. A stone lion in a remote village has— impossibly—lost its ball. Villagers—salt of the earth Sichuanese, playing themselves with relish—insist that the thief was a being made of light. Tang buys the hype, leaving his editorial comrades little choice but to follow. Their trials along the way play out as a comedy, but at the climax gravity flips upside down when backstory and discordant notes seeded earlier pay off.

We’ve seen that Tang is a broken man, driven by passions he can no longer articulate. We’ve seen that he is unable or unwilling to connect meaningfully with his family or colleagues, but all-too-easily drawn to others who “want to believe”, or those who would use this “want” to con him. His longing for alien contact is a longing for the beyond, in the hope to unlock access to something better or deeper than our world can offer, and it pulls Tang up to then over the edge of the map. There, beyond society and past reason, as impenetrable as a flock of brown birds, lies the beyond.

One could make a comparison between JttW and certain moments of the YouTube series Hellier, in which a group of paranormalists go in search of “hobgoblins”’ in the old mining towns of Appalachia. In short order they find themselves driving through a silent world of greenery and burned-out meth labs. Weighed down by little if any irony, our documentarians let tangible horrors intermingle with every unreal entity available—aliens, the mothman, and even the god Pan, for whom they conduct a simple ritual in a dark cave—anything that might augment their interpretive journey. It’s easy to think that only Americans fall into such mental traps, but JttW is a kindly reminder that no matter our origin, when we are lost and pumped full of yearning, any convenient object or incident can play the role of a sign.

Eventually, having left his friends behind and wandered deep into the woods, Tang stumbles into a huge cave where ancient humans, it would seem, have painted red strands of DNA in worship. There, he encounters something. It may be an alien. It may not be. I won’t say, because I want you to watch the film. I will say that in the aftermath, our sojourner reaches a breakthrough with regards to the void. He takes his eyes off the little green men in his mind to become a bigger man, by facing and accepting a long-denied and profound inner pain.

The tangent ends here, but please bear its contents in mind if you choose to continue. (Please also be aware that Three Body spoilers await you. If you haven’t read the entire trilogy, you may wish to get off here.)

The 400 Year Gap
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The Three Body Problem is a first contact story in two senses.

In the first sense, at the level of the story, Liu Cixin’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (of which Three Body is the first entry) follows humanity as it deals with the consequences of having caught the attention of a galactic neighbour, Trisolars (left untranslated as “San Ti” in the Netflix adaptation). Three Body’s cosmos is underpinned by a brutal game theory, as immovable as the laws of physics, which locks Earth and Trisolaris into a kill-or-be-killed scenario where basic trust is possible only through mutually assured destruction.

Humanity has four hundred years before the Trisolarans arrive in the solar system. All of civilisation’s resources are directed toward technological and civilisational catch-up, despite an alien-imposed lockdown on the large particle accelerators, the tool that would otherwise unlock the shortest path to an even-footing. More than once, humanity is brutally punished for thinking they are ready to go toe-to-toe with Trisolaris, or for deviating from the new pitiless technocracy. Liu Cixin is perhaps at his best when dealing these apocalyptic lacerations.

It would be wrong to read Three Body as a one-to-one analogy for anything, but the temptation to project its plot onto China’s relations with “the West” from the crises of the Qing Dynasty onward, all the way into the coming centuries, should not be rejected just because the fruit hangs low. Nor should Liu Cixin’s background in engineering be taken as the only driver behind Three Body’s insistence on the primacy of STEM for survival. Anglophone nations have never had to race through centuries-worth of technological and institutional catch-up in mere decades, and Three Body may well prompt the perceptive Anglophone reader to consider this. Speaking for myself, my education and upbringing in the UK often directed my attention to global and social inequalities, but never led me to consider the desperate practical perspective of, say, a technocrat who, sitting on the receiving end of a European gunboat, wants to even the odds. For western elites today, “acceleration” is a buzzword in business and a dubious fringe theory in politics. But for elites elsewhere, perhaps especially those enduring western sanctions, it has been and remains a matter of survival. Consider for example the “industrial party’”工业堂, a techno-nationalist tendency within China which has found much to relish in the works of Liu Cixin.

A China-and-the-West reading of Three Body is not necessarily a jingoistic reading. There is more at play than power, technology, and suspicion. Across the trilogy, Trisolaris and humanity do manage to conduct cultural exchange at a distance, once galactic communications are possible, and some trust has been established. In the third book, Death’s End, the true foe is entropy itself—an invisible, universal law. In the face of the final, utterly inescapable void, the two civilisations establish a calm and dignified connection I found extremely moving… but won’t dare spoil. Opposition is circumstantial, not permanent—and it’s never personal.

Cultural Feedback Machine
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The second sense in which Three Body is a first contact story extends into non-fiction; into our own reality. The translation, publication, and massive success of the trilogy in translation marks the point where readership in “the West”—perhaps “the world”—achieved general awareness of the science fiction scene in China which had taken shape, broadly speaking, from the eighties onward. Prior to this blow-up, West/China cultural exchange in the genre had been one-way. Science fiction translations into Chinese date back to the late years of the Qing dynasty. Indeed, these early imports prompted the first science fiction stories in Chinese. Now Liu Cixin (and many of his less famous peers) have found their place in the global library.

The cultural back and forth which this publication has triggered is still unfolding. An amusing early episode in the exchange saw Three Body translator Ken Liu ask Liu Cixin if he could move a shocking Cultural Revolution scene from the middle of the novel to the front. Liu confided that this had in fact been his intent, and that he only buried it in the middle to avoid immediately triggering the censors. We can only speculate what these censors think of him today.

The Netflix adaptation, styled 3 Body Problem, demonstrates the two-way exchange system in action. It is a US-funded, UK-set production with a (deliberately) multi-ethnic cast, which has not discarded all of its Chinese components. It was adapted from a Chinese novel beloved within and beyond China, and now the adaptation is being consumed and dissected in a multiplicity of linguistic and cultural spheres. The elites want to fight over it. So do the nerds. Good.

Strange Cousins
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The Netflix adaptation is not the first to touch down. Back in 2017, a beautiful and rather ominous movie poster showed up in my local cinema in Shanghai, right on the border of Xuhui and Minhang district. That particular project fell into limbo and vanished, but three arose to take its place:

My Three Body, produced by Chinese fans, entirely… in Minecraft
Three Body – Animation, an animated Chinese adaptation of book 2, The Dark Forest
Three-Body, a 30-episode adaption of book 1, from Chinese media giant Tencent

I read the books years ago, watched the Tencent adaptation not too long ago, and watched the Netflix adaptation very recently. Tencent’s show is an effectively paranoiac but overlong retelling of book 1. The aforementioned shocking Cultural Revolution sequence does not feature—blame the censorship regime—but the adaptation is otherwise very faithful. It also adds a couple of fairly interesting female characters—covering one of Liu Cixin’s weak points at the cost of more filler. A 15- or 20-episode cap might have made this iteration a masterpiece.

The Netflix show rockets along, passing beyond book 1 and into book 2 in only eight episodes. It achieves this with simplifications and short cuts, none of them particularly offensive to continuity or the level-headed Liu Cixin-enthusiast. It could have been an absolute stinker, but to me it is a satisfying success. But I am not here to assign a trisolar rating. What interests me the most is how each show treats its literal aliens (外星人) and its figurative aliens (外国人).

In Kong Dashan’s Journey to the West, everybody is Chinese, and the alien is something really—“alien”. It is fundamentally unknowable, but to seek it is to chance at enlightenment. In Liu Cixin’s novels, the cosmos itself is the site of alienation—it is simply too dangerous to ever make interstellar contact, lest an unknown “shooter” wipe you out. The Trisolarans are knowable in some sense, but never seen. On Earth, nearly all of the cast is Chinese, and the remainder are generally rotters. The two most important non-Chinese characters are murderous, self-righteous Americans—Mike Evans the misanthropic eco-terrorist and Thomas Wade the psychopathic pragmatist.

Curiously, there is also a parallel between Three Body and Liu’s The Wandering Earth regarding Japanese characters. Both stories feature a Japanese woman who marries a male protagonist, only to betray both him and humanity further down the line. In addition, Sophon, Trisolaris’s android ambassador, takes on the dress and appearance of a refined Japanese lady, and even holds tea ceremonies with her human interlocutors—which all seems rather sweet until she takes the lead in forcing all of humanity into a giant concentration camp. She even hacks some inmates to death with a katana, to instil discipline. Thus the gynoid embraces her assigned national identity, while the humans cling onto theirs. In the trilogy, there’s never a clear sense that Earth’s national identities dissolve or blur as the centuries progress. The only substantive nod in this direction is the name of the character “艾AA”, but it is down to the reader to decide whether this reads more as a blurring between a human and posthuman naming system, or a hybridisation of Chinese and Latin script practices. Ultimately, historical trauma and 21st century concerns maintain their hold, as does a “China v West + Japan” scope for advanced human civilisation.

My Ten Cents
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The representation of foreigners in the Tencent adaptation is a little baffling. The actor cast to play Mike Evans is a young man who only ever appears “aged up”, and dubbed over, in English, by a Chinese voice actor. Curiouser still, we never see any flashback scenes where this young man plays the young Mike Evans. Perhaps they were cut, since they would likely have depicted Evans’s undertaking ecological activism inside China, expressing some very critical—if nonspecific—views.

We do regularly see an international council of (all male, mostly white) generals (seemingly chaired by China’s representative, Chang Weisi), but Australia’s representative speaks with an American accent, and America’s representative speaks with an Australian accent. Other minor “foreigner” roles in the show are performed amateurishly.

While much of the above could be blamed on a backward approach to handling and representing “the other”, it makes more sense to consider the material concerns: China does not have access to a wide pool of international actors, and Tencent probably lacked the funds or infrastructure to pull big talent in from overseas. Additionally, we can assume Tencent’s executives knew their audience would be overwhelmingly domestic, and probably unconcerned about (for example) any AUS/US mix-ups. (That said, the entire series can be watched for free, with English subtitles, on Tencent’s YouTube channel. That’s how I watched it, and I’m grateful.)

Humans aside, the Tencent adaptation opens with effective, ominous use of “the alien”. Cinematography in early episodes traps its characters; obscured behind glass, sheathed in shadow or shallow focus—all in dim, depopulated, and somewhat unreal places. An unseen force is haunting the world. The aliens are as they should be: disembodied and living inside of us. Our protagonist, Wang Miao, gets truly rattled as his sense of reality soaks up blow upon blow. We feel the strain placed on his family, work, and mental health. When he soldiers on in the face of the unknown, it means something.

But over time the soldiering turns to a plod, and the horror and wonder of the unknown collapses. Just as we are learning about the true nature of Trisolaran society and its ruthless determination to survive, we somehow find ourselves watching a blobby CGI, humanoid creature delivering multiple lectures to a society of other blobby, humanoid creatures. His voice has been pitched down, presumably to lend a little inhuman gravitas, but it only makes matters worse. Even if these humanoid blobs are intended only as a symbolic representation of the Trisolarans, it’s a betrayal of the menace and mystery that Liu Cixin purposely builds up towards the end of his first book. Across the entirety of the trilogy, we never see a Trisolaran nor learn anything substantive about their appearance. By the end of book 1, these creatures and their tools are invisible, omnipotent, bringers of doom. Mankind is facing down the prospect of humiliation, defeat, and extinction at their hands. They should not ever become blobby little orators.

Netflix Internationalism:
Casting and Killing
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A glance through the producer credits on the Netflix adaptation reveals some curiosities. Three big Hollywood names are in there: Rian Johnson, Brad Pitt, and Rosamund Pike. Besides Liu Cixin himself, among the figures of mainland Chinese extraction numbers Gao Xiaosong, a cultural jack of all trades and Alibaba affiliate. The diaspora is here too. Literary translator Ken Liu bags a credit, having advised on the adaptation. The show’s writer and showrunner line-up includes Chinese-American Alexander Woo, and two episodes were directed by Hong Kong’s Derek Tsang.

As for the cast, they are overwhelmingly Westerners, but drawn from a diverse range of ethnicities and nationalities. Among the Chinese cast and characters there is diversity too: diaspora, migrants, mixed-parentage, bilingualism, and so on. So, in terms of pure headcount the show does move beyond Liu Cixin’s white-Anglo/Mandarin-mainland binary but does not avoid his Sino/West binary. It is worth considering that most mainland Chinese actors may have been off the table due to practical concerns (budget, language barriers, etc) and also political flak—because this adaptation opens immediately into the aforementioned Cultural Revolution scene, which climaxes upon a truly upsetting killing. Quibbles over the Netflix adaptation’s handling of the historical particulars are valid, but in that opening the viewer is presented with a grim discomfort not available on mainland Chinese television.

The intangible cultural characteristics are balanced similarly. Han elements remain in the frame and are not reduced to decoration, but the Anglosphere claims the foreground. This version of the story is set in the nexus of Western academia, acronym agencies, and venture capital start-ups. Western social norms dominate: our characters’ open attitudes toward sex, recreational drugs, antidepressants, and dark humour are used to mark them as relatable, not criminal. It’s hard to imagine the character of older Ye Wenjie in her book or Tencent incarnation saying anything like “time is a motherfucker”. I don’t think Wang Miao would go searching for the anal beads of a freshly murdered childhood friend. The violence is sharper too—fleshier, and cruel. This glinting edge works quite nicely with the show’s rapid pace, and more open embrace of menace.

Netflix Internationalism:
a Note on Sophon’s Dress and Weaponry
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Several actors of partly Chinese descent appear in passing: Vedette Lim as Vera Ye, Eve Ridley as Follower (modelled on a young Vera), and comedian Phil Wang (cameoing under the name “Aristotle”).

^{Sophon striding over magma}

Less fleetingly, we meet Sea Shimooka, who is of Japanese, Native Hawaiian and French descent. Going by a glance and her in-show accent, you can’t place her anywhere on the globe. This is ideal, because she plays the synthetic alien envoy, Sophon. In his novels, Liu Cixin styles Sophon as Japanese with a capital J. The Netflix adaptation plays a more complicated game. Here, Sophon retains her katana but does not wear a kimono. Instead, she’s wearing a dress that does show some East Asian influences, but is also ultimately unplaceable. It’s subtle, secular, and appropriate to the mood and character—but the source text’s open embrace of national-signifiers has paid its due. The resulting character is a novel and striking hybrid; so visually arresting that she was used to dominate the show’s teaser trailers. I know I won’t be the only one to long remember the sight of Sophon striding over magma. I hope that in the coming seasons there will be more hybrid design and decision-making. As in biology, much of cultural evolution is driven not by lone prodigies plucking novelties from the ether, but through the chaotic recombination of existing elements—therein lies potential for enormous creativity.

Netflix Internationalism:
Playground Britannia
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To its credit, the Netflix adaptation builds upon the all-mankind sentiment that Liu Cixin’s trilogy proposes but never fully commits to. In the most basic sense, we can see commitment in the choice to set the present-day events of book 1 in the UK and not the US. Netflix is one part of corporate American consciousness, which much like many individual Americans is loath to imagine lesser powers taking the lead. Britain’s NATO alignment may have eased some of that Yankee anxiety, as may have the island nation’s ankle-biter status relative to the US and China.

Britain’s significance-or-not is a question for minds other than my own, but in the context of 3 Body Problem’s plot and production, the south of England feels an apt choice for the setting. In some sense it remains the centre of the Anglosphere. Geographically, the UK sits somewhere midway between the US and Chinese eastern seaboards, and the elite quarters of its private school, academic, and corporate sectors serve as a globalised landing pad where a portion of the present and future administrators of the world can step out to trade jovial jabs on freshly mown lawns. Ordinary British people are shut out of the proverbial dinner party—though in 3 Body you’ll glimpse some of them behind counters and in uniform, serving our heroes nice drinks in exchange for £11.44 per hour.

Netflix Internationalism:
the Obfuscatory Technique
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Who exactly is leading earth’s anti-Trisolaran preparations? On television it’s a muddy affair. In Tencent’s adaptation, a stoic People’s Liberation Army general named Chang Weisi convenes on an international council with a selection of other generals, each clearly labelled with the name of his nation. Chang appears to be in charge, and he doesn’t have to deal with any high-GDP factions coalescing to oust him. Lucky guy.

In the Netflix adaptation, Liam Cunningham’s Thomas Wade take’s Chang’s place. Everything about the agency that he manages is deliberately unclear. He might be reporting to 10 Downing Street, the White House, the UN, or to God. We don’t know. Eventually we see him call on a diverse panel of advisory experts, but they do not come with passports or little flags attached. At the UN, the secretary geneal is a black woman. She sounds American, but the show doesn’t clarify whether she is as she sounds, or whether she’s from Africa and speaking English with a Western accent. Call me a pedant, but in a story of global coming-together, produced by Sino-Western corporate and creative collaboration, I think specificity matters.

To be generous, I might argue that while Liu Cixin’s depiction of the merging of humanity’s many tribes drags its feet, Netflix jumps the gun. Perhaps the showrunners unanimously agreed that contact with hostile aliens would push globalisation to immediate completion, obsolescing all questions of language and nationality overnight.

To be less charitable, I would say that Western elites typically prefer to direct attention away from the hegemony they maintain and enjoy. In the neoliberal’s ideal TV drama, everybody worthy of depiction and inclusion already partakes in their cosy consensus. Peering over the garden fence is discouraged not because the exploited or dissenting entities beyond are to be abhorred, but because one is not supposed to acknowledge the fact that the fence exists. Specificity is an ideological inconvenience and TINA—There Is No Alternative—may also be read as There Is No Alien.

There is No Such Thing as Society
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In the Netflix adaptation, Wang Miao and other “book characters” are replaced by an entirely new set of characters, “the Oxford Five”–five neat neoliberal subjects. Oxford is an elite institution that one may only enter through merit, and by paying the relevant fees. Three of the Oxford Five—Jin, Auggie, and Saul—are not British, and unless shielded by bursaries will have come from enough wealth to cover the enormous tuition fees for overseas students. Of the two remaining Brits, one, Jack Rooney, has gone from being a dropout to a “cool nerd” tycoon (so we can assume he’s building a bunker in New Zealand). Will Downing is the least successful in neoliberal terms, having gone on to become a physics teacher, but like his peers he seems to be insulated from economic contingency.

All five characters are childless and generally unattached from family concerns, which makes for a striking contrast with Wang Miao. The Tencent adaptation never lets you forget that he has a family to consider. The Oxford Five are individual, rational agents whose lives are almost entirely intellectual and economic. They are laid-back, science-loving, cool-ironic, global citizens imbued with liberal values and free from any dangerous radical or traditional dogmas. Auggie Salazar briefly falls into alcoholism, but it’s just a lifestyle choice—her health doesn’t suffer, and her hair still looks great. I suspect many American television executives and Oxbridge alumni alike would believe that the members of this jolly band of mates are living fairly ordinary lives.

The only not-wealthy, not-elite British character we spend any time with is Benedict Wong’s Clarence Shi, who has a northern accent, and when queried about his Chinese identity quickly replies, “I’m from Manchester”. From scenes set in his living room we can see that he lives in an ordinary British family home. Given the cost of living crisis most of us are currently going through here (trust the experts, it’s dire), and conversations concerning economic frustration that he has with his son, we can assume that Clarence is grievously underpaid by his employer—a nameless, state-affiliated agency that is sufficiently funded to procure—for example—30 nuclear bombs. Perhaps in Season 2, Clarence will get a pay rise to match his responsibilities, but for the time being I suspect the show is rather lazily linking his north-western English identity with his relative poverty.

Given the squeaky-clean lives of the Oxford Five, I find this rather grating. This show that appears to have gone out of its way to emphasise diversity delivers no substantive class diversity. The offering is a choice palette of skin tones and a scattering of cultural tokens. Directing all attention to the surface is a neoliberal technique; it smooths the obfuscation and elision of basic material questions. Here I ask the reader to cast their mind back to Journey to the West, where long-suffering Tang has wagered his entire life on the slim hopes for a transcendental escape from the dull, misery-inducing constraints of income, heating bills, and travel expenses.

Qin Shihuang vs Kublai Khan
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The Netflix adaptation plays particularly intriguing games with culture and identity inside its in-universe game. In the virtual reality game that underpins book 1, Liu Cixin has Wang Miao learn about the Trisolarans’ planetary plight through a game where certain levels are styled after certain Chinese eras and dynasties. We begin with the Zhou, and progress to the Qin. In these virtual regimes Liu Cixin inserts a range of Chinese and European characters who both his educated Chinese readers and the white-collar Wang Miao will be familiar with. Consider Isaac Newton, Galileo, Mozi, and Qin Shihuang. Readers of the translation may not be familiar with the Chinese figures, but this presents an opportunity to “meet the aliens”, and greet them on equal standing with the European rationalists.

In the Netflix adaptation, the game throws Jin Cheng into the Zhou level and Jack Rooney into a new, equivalent Tudor level. When Jack initially attempts to enter the Zhou level over and over, Sophon immediately decapitates him, over and over. At first this felt a little disappointing to me—Jin and Jack appeared to be being slotted into their own little ethno-cultural boxes; all cultural contact with “the outside” prohibited.

But later, Jack and Jin enter the Tudor level together, and later still they enter another new level where Qin Shihuang and his Qin Dynasty have been replaced by Kublai Khan and his Yuan Dynasty. Jin refers to the setting as “Shangdu”, and on that phonic clue Jack echoes with “Xanadu” and a line from Coleridge’s famous poem. Where in the past level the two Fivers have been clad in refined Chinese and Tudor jackets and gowns, now they’re in the chunkier furs and robes of the Mongol elite. The average non-Sinophile Western viewer will be more or less in Jack’s shoes here, now grasping—if hazily— that there was a historical reality to Coleridge’s Kublai that links “the khans” to Chinese culture. It’s not a crash course on the Yuan, but it’s a brief exposure to the interpenetrative cultural complexity of the Sinosphere.

Had the show thrown Jack and viewers alike into an audience with Qin Shihuang, they would have had no Coleridgean shortcut to understanding his historical significance other than through a burst of expository dialogue. In this way, the Netflix adaptation expands the cultural palette of the novel without jettisoning or disdaining its Han roots. It will be interesting to see if this continues in subsequent seasons, when the show will be drawing on source material that, excluding a few fairy-tales-of-no-nation, leaves all the cultural strata of Earth—Chinese or not—far behind.

Liu Cixin, Cixin Liu
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I’ve seen one online commenter speculate that the appeal of The Three Body Problem to Westerners may have lain in its “zero morals” approach to interplanetary relations—a farewell to neoliberal handwringing and neocon excuse-finding, perhaps. Others have been so mistakenly bold as to say the book reveals “the Chinese perspective”—needless to say, this is essentialism and should be disregarded. But if we swap “the” for “a”—“the book reveals a Chinese perspective”—then we at least have ground to stand on.

Liu Cixin’s cold and pragmatic view of power, survival, and technological confrontation (which, don’t fool yourself, is not “zero morals”) does surface in his other works (see The Wandering Earth, or Ants and Dinosaurs), but it exists in tension with a sympathetic and sometimes even warm championing of the invincible pan-human spirit. One could feasibly draw some connection between these contradictory impulses and the trajectory of modern Chinese history: a struggle to modernise, enter “the world”, and bring secular humanist ideals to fruition in the face of massive internal and external pressure.

So far, so Sino. But the catch is that Liu Cixin is not very much like the other Chinese science fiction writers you can read in English translation. In the novels and short stories of Han Song, Hao Jingfang, Chen Qiufan et al, patterns and idiosyncrasies denoting Chinese origin are almost always recognisable, but there is no master structure to be found under the microscope. Each writer has personal priorities, fixations, strengths, and blind spots. The primary common ground is the genre, not the flag or the language or the DNA.

There is No Such Thing
as the Centre of the Universe
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There is enormous value in reading books from the other side of the world. There really is a chance for you the reader to glimpse “the alien”—possibly an unremarkable entity, possibly a kindred spirit, or possibly poised to offend your precious sensibilities, rattle off a list of your sins, and assail you with modes of sophistry previously inconceivable.

In all such cases the encounter is valuable, and in all cases the alien you meet is not a living thing. It is the literary crystal formed inside another human being, ground up and arranged on the page. It will have emerged from a particular writer, during a particular stretch of their life, in a particular place, alongside particular peers—this is the metadata, relevant but secondary information.

In the case of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, multiple entities have collided and their dusts have intermingled. No Chinese or Western viewer will be encountering an object entirely of their own geography, nor will they necessarily be encountering an utterly novel strain of hybrid. The various regions and playful cultures called China and the West have been swapping their best stories with relish for more than a hundred years. Each year, globalisation persists, and deepens itself through this persistence. Almost everything we consume is a product of integration and recombination. There’s nothing new under the sun. Only this time the suns are triple, and ferocious, and utterly unpredictable…

May the Alien Bless You
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…and no matter the danger one ought to end on a cheerful note, so I’ll take us back to comedy—to my favourite scene in Journey to the West. In some nowhere town, Tang and his ever-patient company stop off to meet a man who claims to have conversed with a dying alien. Shortly after it died, he popped its body in a refrigerator. This man says—in so many words—that he’ll open the refrigerator only to “the chosen one”, and to become the chosen one, one must make a hefty donation. Tang complies, and the alien is revealed: it’s a total fake, poorly sculpted and wearing little boxer shorts. Tang’s friends dissuade him from committing a second donation, but when their guard is down, he bolts, and manages to shove more red notes into the conman’s moneybox.

As Tang’s friends drag him away, scolding him furiously, the newly enriched conman yells his encouragement: “我支持你!” (Meaning something like “I support you/I’m with you/I’m on your side”.)

The English subtitle here reads “Alien bless you”, and it sticks out, partly because it’s adorable and partly because the subtitles (in my copy, anyway) are otherwise pretty free from translationese. Trying to puzzle this out, I searched online and found one similarly intrigued Chinese viewer who proposed a theory: the filmmakers used this “creative” translation to plant a clue, hinting that the conman is himself an alien, cheering Tang along on his spiritual quest. I have my doubts as to the profundity of that theory, but not to its method. I already believe that the filmmakers strategically gave their film a “double-barrelled’—Chinese-English title, so I want to believe they took that approach even further. I want to believe that they want us to know that the alien can bless us. The alien is beneficent. The alien is everywhere. In pursuit of the alien, we will find our own answers.

Yet we persist in our vanities, closed off against the men and women we share the planet with and cast adrift from the animals by our knowledge of the void. Send us your blessings, please. We are the aliens.

How to cite: Stewart, Angus. “Alien Bless You: A Review of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Apri. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/29/3-body-problem.

Angus Stewart is a Dundonian living in Greater Manchester who writes occasional strange stories and essays. His works have appeared in various small publications including Ab Terra, STAT and Dark Horses. His show, the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, is on hiatus. [All contributions by Angus Stewart.]