I am a huge fan of the Netflix adaptation. I'll pick up the books once I finish This is How You Lose the Time War and Roadside Picnic.

Quote Originally Posted by Zombimode View Post
Three Body Problems seems to me a very odd choice to bring to the screen. As a novel very much in the tradition of Asimov it cares more about ideas and concept then about memorable characters or show value. Large parts of the books consists of people having thoughts which I can't imagine being terribly interesting to watch. And on the flip side there are many scenes that take up a paragraph or two in the books but that would be very expensive to produce in a visual medium (like the human computer).
I was also a big fan of the Foundation series on Apple TV, so it's been a good couple years for on-screen depiction of quantum-entangled technology. I barely remember reading Foundation as a child, but recently heard a description of the novel as "White Guys with Mutton Chops Voicing Opinions", which made me chuckle. The translation of both from page to screen requires a bit of artistic license without changing the core concepts and ideas.

My main question that was left unanswered is how precisely the San-Ti & sympathizers interact with the world at large.
  1. When Tatiana is being unobserved by electronic devices - is that the sophons themselves hacking the cameras to 'remove her in post', people with access to San-Ti technology, or the Sophons interposing the act of recording itself? In Daniel Suarez's Daemon, the titular program hacks everything and can manipulate it at will, so when it gives an agent an "invisibility ring" (so they don't show up on camera or other surveillance), it's essentially doing live post-production removal.
  2. When they do the Eye in the Sky thing, are they doing an infinite-stretch of the sophon into a planet-sized blanket, or are the 2 sophons just bouncing around the eyes of the human population (not unlike the countdown displays)?
  3. There seems to be another branch of people that are working for the San-Ti - specifically, those who are creating the headsets and dropping them places. This made sense in a story like The Peripheral, where any given town has the ability to print technology and medications if given the information, but 3BP's world seems to be set in a "Right Now Plus" setting. They show that the game itself does exist in a form we recognize (the petabytes of data that they find from the harddrives of the Judgement Day), so it's feasible there's a mad engineer and associated courier out there that's just fulfilling orders using San-Ti designs & tools.



Tangentially related - I also just saw that there's a Chinese adaptation called "Three Body" on Amazon Prime that was released last year - has anyone checked that one out?