NETFLIX - SERIES
The three-body problem and the Cultural Revolution. These two issues, one a matter of celestial mechanics, the other of terrestrial history, have a destructive instability in common. Chinese novelist Liu Cixin built a colossal science-fiction trilogy (Remembrance of Earth's Past, published in English in 2014-2016) on this connection, and we're grateful to his US adapters, David Benioff, D. B. Weiss (having both cut their – medieval – teeth with the adaptation of Game of Thrones) and Alexander Woo, for preserving the foundational comparison.
The historical anchor allows the first season of a story that travels to the end of time to remain within reach of the imagination. Those familiar with science fiction (which gives equal weight to both terms) and a fortiori Liu Cixin's readers will undoubtedly be more at ease in this universe, which brings together spaces and temporalities that should only have met ad infinitum.
With Netflix's impressive resources at their disposal, the creators have sought, and often found, a way to reach the uninitiated who have never wondered how long it would take an extraterrestrial fleet to invade our planet, or what daily life is like in a solar system with three stars with unpredictable movements.
This acclimatization of an often abstract narrative to the rules of popular fiction is not without its creative accidents. Where George R. R. Martin's universe, rich in literary and pictorial heritage dating back to the High Middle Ages, elicited imagery of familiar strangeness, Liu Cixin's scientific and poetic flights of fancy each represent a challenge of dramaturgy and staging, providing each scene with uneven fortune.
It's best to let yourself go as the story unfolds, as it gradually reveals its mainspring. If you've already read the trilogy, or if you're ready to know exactly what it's about, here it is: In 1967, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) witnesses the martyrdom of her father, a physicist like herself, at the hands of the Red Guards. Because she prefers to put science rather than politics in command, the young woman is sent to a re-education camp, before being assigned to a communications base. She soon discovers that, contrary to Maoist doctrine, which refuses to consider a single field of knowledge that has not been embraced by the thought of the Great Helmsman, the purpose of this facility is to make contact with extraterrestrial life forms.
More than half a century later, the scientific community has been hit by an epidemic of suicides, but not everyone has died. Some have received a virtual reality headset that gives them access to a planet, a satellite of three different suns, in the grip of chaos. These suicides and the prodigious video game are replicas of the dialogue initiated, and the earthquake triggered, by Ye Wenjie from the top of her mountain.
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