Three Body Problem Netflix, 'Game of Thrones' creators Benioff and Weiss

 Three Body Problem Netflix, 'Game of Thrones' creators Benioff and Weiss.

My jaw actually dropped, like something out of a cheesy cartoon, when I read this news Tuesday morning: Netflix is adapting Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem book trilogy as a series, led by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. What sounds like television Mad Libs—pick a streaming service! Now a piece of intellectual property to adapt! Now controversial creators!—is apparently real, and while Netflix has not yet announced a time frame for the new show, it’s safe to say the result could be either as spectacular as the first four seasons of Game of Thrones or as dreadful as, well, the last season of Game of Thrones.

With such a range of potential outcomes, let’s explore the pros and cons of this project. No spoilers ahead on the books for those of you who haven’t read the series yet—though you might want to schedule a “hold” at your local library soon.

Pro: This series is awesome

I mean that in the literal sense: This series inspires awe. Netflix executive Peter Friedlander wrote in his blog post announcing the project that the books “changed what science fiction meant to me forever”—and I agree with Friedlander.

Broadly speaking, this trilogy—formally named the Remembrance of Earth’s Past, though often called the Three-Body Problem series after the title of the first book—is a work of hard science fiction, centered on Earth’s first contact with an alien civilization. It spans immense tracts of time and space, and the first book, as George R.R. Martin put it in his blog post about the tale years ago, contains “a unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology, where kings and emperors from both western and Chinese history mingle in a dreamlike game world, while cops and physicists deal with global conspiracies, murders, and alien invasions in the real world.”

Since reading the series for the first time last year, I have frequently reflected on moments or morals that the books share, and they both changed how I think about humanity’s place in the universe and increased my appetite for science fiction writ large. Just as Thrones inspired a whole wave of new inventive fantasy shows, a Three-Body Problem show, if done well, could do the same for science fiction. The first novel won the 2015 Hugo Award for best science-fiction or fantasy novel—Liu was the first Asian winner—and has already helped inspire a wave of Chinese science fiction. (Liu’s novella The Wandering Earth was also adapted as a movie of the same name, which quickly became a hit.)

The story is entertaining enough by itself; Barack Obama read the series in the White House and praised it as “wildly imaginative.” And it’s a story designed for bingeing, with the first book in particular centered on a mystery that could compel viewers to click from one episode to the next without stopping—perfect for the Netflix model.