The first time they read the three volumes of 3 Body Problem, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss felt a mixture of exhilaration and fear. The two men may have steered the Game of Thrones ship through eight seasons, but when Peter Friedlander, head of series production in North America for Netflix, introduced them to Chinese author Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy, published between 2006 and 2010, Benioff thought, "I wanted to do it, and I didn't know how to do it!" He said: "If we got to the third season and we're able to do it, it would be incredibly difficult. And also, if we somehow pulled it off, I knew we'd be presenting something to an audience that, people haven't seen before."

By the time the duo of 50-somethings, who have been practicing since they met at Trinity College Dublin (the former is a New Yorker, the latter, a Chicagoan), began to tackle 3 Body Problem, they were emerging from a difficult period. The colossal success of Game of Thrones had been tarnished by the controversy surrounding the last two seasons, the writing of which the two screenwriters had overseen, since the author of the original novels, George R. R. Martin, had not managed to wrap up his story in time. The fan community blamed them for all the heresies.

After the final season of this epic, in 2019, their next project, Confederate, was stillborn. This alternative history, which imagined that the Southern states had succeeded in perpetuating slavery, provoked an outcry that forced HBO (the network that had produced Game of Thrones) to abandon it. After leaving the Warner Group subsidiary in the wake of this failure, Benioff and Weiss made a stopover at Disney, where they proposed to go back into the history of the Star Wars universe by writing the story of The First Jedi, a project soon rejected by the studio.

Rather than pushing them toward the easy way out, these setbacks prompted the two men to seek out a challenge. A massive publishing phenomenon in Asia, 3 Body Problem is a fascinating work that turns the perspective of an encounter of the third kind on its head. The extraterrestrials, who have entered into communication with mankind on the initiative of a Chinese scientist in the years following the Cultural Revolution, are determined to abandon their solar system organized around three stars whose instability (the three-body problem) leads to alternating periods of stability and chaos.

A scientist by training, Liu Cixin built her fictional world around notions of physics and astronomy that require a tough (and rewarding) apprenticeship. Reading the trilogy, one wonders how the instantaneous freeze-drying of millions of extraterrestrials as their planet entered a phase of chaos could be depicted on screen, or how a computer miniaturized to the size of an atom, yet still visible, would be visible.

You have 68.14% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.