Comment on Netflix’s Sci-Fi Series '3 Body Problem' to Film Seasons 2 & 3 Back-To-Back

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Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

I guess that depends why you liked the books.

For my part, I had issues with both the show and the books, but very different issues.

Cixin Liu, in my opinion, exhibits all the best and worst elements of Isaac Asimov. His books are big on themes and complex scientific and philosophical ideas, but lack even the most basic elements of character and story structure. These are elements that lend themselves well to short form fiction and poorly to longer narratives, which is why I love the robot stories, but really don’t care for Foundation all that much.

The series swings too hard in the other direction, IMO, downplaying the big ideas in favour of much more focus on characters and structure. In doing so it often demands that we spend a lot of time focusing on ordinary human drama when - in my experience - we really want to be focusing on the really cool scifi shit that’s going on. Granted, this wouldn’t be a problem if the characters were more interesting, but I found most of them fairly dull and unlikeable, even if they are at least more fleshed out than in the original books. The structural changes are also a mixed bag, with a lot of elements being presented in a more chronological order, with the unfortunate result that it becomes quite unclear what the point of a lot of this stuff is actually meant to be. Liu’s narrative is less constrained by a need for strict chronology and this gives him more ability to put events together in context.

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