AFTER REDEFINING ON-SCREEN FANTASY WITH GAME OF THRONES, CAN SHOWRUNNERS DAVID BENIOFF AND D.B. WEISS PULL OFF THE SAME TRICK WITH HARD SCIENCE-FICTION SAGA

WORDS HELEN O’HARA

3 BODY PROBLEM?

Room with quite a view: Supercomputer Sophon (Sea Shimooka) with Jack (John Bradley) and Jin (Jess Hon

A reflective Wade (Game Of Thrones veteran Liam Cunningham)

Auggie’s (Eiza González) round

THE SHOWRUNNERS WERE SCARED.

But that’s just how they liked it. Fear is exactly why David Benioff and D.B. Weiss picked The Three-Body Problem —title reconfigured for the screen as 3 Body Problem —as their follow-up to Game Of Thrones. Cixin Liu’s trilogy of novels is hard sci-fi, heavy on the theoretical physics but seriously lacking in sexy green aliens or lasers that go pew-pew. It starts during China’s Cultural Revolution and finishes at the end of the universe, with flashbacks to ancient history through a virtual-reality game. The alien threats are often invisible, though later books pose the challenge of depicting artefacts that exist in five, or six, or ten dimensions, rather than our native four. Even the title refers to a problem with no solution. Stanley Kubrick would have loved it.

The two showrunners didn’t initially know how to describe it, let alone shoot it, which brought on some déjà vu. At first they couldn’t sum up George R.R. Martin’s bloody, Machiavellian fantasy to agents or peers either. Now the same sense of trepidation, the total lack of any roadmap for their adaptation, felt perversely comforting. They knew they didn’t want to do another high fantasy, but another “big genre”, as Benioff calls it, would be right on track.

“If someone had said to me before reading these books, ‘Do you want to do an alien-invasion story?’, there would have been no interest whatsoever,” Benioff told Empire, on set in July 2022. “But these books came at it in such a different way. That’s the appeal and the intimidation factor; they’re linked for us. ‘How do you encompass all of this in a show?’ We didn’t know and I’m not sure we know yet. But it’s made it such a fun challenge.”

Back when they started, they didn’t know Game Of Thrones would become a global phenomenon, winning 59 Emmys and being broadcast in 173 countries. The question now is whether this sci-fi effort can break through in the same way. It’s an alien-invasion story, yes, but an invasion that almost no-one notices. In the present day of the show, only a series of strange deaths among the top ranks of theoretical physicists alert the authorities that something has gone wrong. Are these really the suicides they appear? Is something else at work?