Even though the showrunners of 3 Body Problem had decades of experience adapting popular book series to create Emmy-winning television — David Benioff and D.B. Weiss with Game of Thrones, Alexander Woo with True Blood — transforming Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award-winning sci-fi trilogy presented a few novel challenges. “As books, they work enormously well, and we were excited by the challenge of making a show that makes you feel the way that we felt when we read them,” says Weiss. “It isn’t exactly the same as just translating the books chapter and verse because we don’t think that would make you feel the way we felt reading the books.”

Known collectively as Remembrance of Earth’s Past, Liu’s trilogy is, shall we say, expansive. Over the course of more than 1,500 pages, the Chinese author weaves a tale that’s rich in high-level physics, theories of war, and human drama, and presents a host of thought-provoking questions, the most important one being: What would happen if we knew an alien invasion was coming, but we had four hundred years to prepare? The answer factors in international politics, questions of morality, and even factions that welcome — and assist — an alien arrival. Encoming Liu’s sweeping themes would surely be difficult on its own, but in translating the books for television, Benioff, Weiss, and Woo needed to devote attention to developing the novels’ protagonists who don’t often meet.

“My focus was on the ideas, and the ideas are extraordinary,” says Woo. “They are unlike anything I’ve ever read, and it’s hard for me to even conceive of how a human being could have come up with them. But having worked on a show — [as have] David and Dan, obviously — where the characters took you through a journey of years, I think [characters] are the secret to a television series that really gets under your skin and becomes something living.”

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