3 Body Problem Review

The opening is the best thing here and it is not close. A physicist watches her father beaten to death by students in 1966 and makes a decision about humanity that the rest of the story spends eight hours paying for, and the sequence is staged with a bleakness the rest of the series never matches. The other high point is the Panama Canal, where a ship is drawn through a lattice of nanofibre and sliced into layers, an idea from the page realised with genuine horror.

Jess Hong is very good, Benedict Wong is a pleasure, and Jonathan Pryce brings weight. The relocation is the cost. Turning the novel's Chinese scientific establishment into a group of Oxford friends who all happen to be central to the crisis flattens the geopolitics that gave the book its force, and it turns a story about civilisations into a story about five people who keep bumping into each other. The virtual reality game sequences look expensive and mean little. The dialogue explains its own physics far too often.