How Game of Thrones showrunners switched from fantasy to sci-fi with 3 Body Problem

Next week, Netflix will drop the first season of the new sci-fi show 3 Body Problem, based on the Remembrance of Earth's Past novel. The series comes from Alexander Woo, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the latter two of whom are best known as the creators of the HBO's hit fantasy show Game of Thrones. 3 Body Problem is a very different kind of story. Roughly, it's about the mystery behind the deaths of several scientists around the world, and the question of what it means if we find out we're not alone in the universe.

In short, it means the Game of Thrones guys are switching from fantasy to sci-fi, which can be a hard sell. Even Benioff admitted that science fiction isn't his "favorite genre," but there's something special about this story that called to him. "I wasn't necessarily drawn to it because I know anything about physics or because I care that much about particles colliding with each other," he said during a roundtable interview, according to The Telegraph. "I really fell in love with the human story. That was our biggest motivation, with this television retelling of the story."

"It is about how people learn from their mistakes and turn themselves around, even if they've made terrible mistakes in their past," added Weiss. "We have tried to tell the story by sticking to the characters and their motivations and what they were experiencing and events that were happening in the story rather than try to take a top down approach and say, 'Well, this is indicative of the world we are in right now'."

The Remembrance of Earth's Past books do have human stories, but they also have a lot of technical scientific language that I suspect will be hard to avoid entirely. Making it digestible for a large audience will be tricky, but Benioff and Weiss already adapted an allegedly unadaptable book series with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, so they have some experience.

Game of Thrones showrunners want to adapt all three of the 3 Body Problem books

Together with Woo, Benioff and Weiss spent a long time working out how to sell this story to the masses. "This is what we did most of the pandemic," Woo said. "David, Dan and I met for the first time at the end of February 2020. And then we didn't see each other in person for another two years. But we saw each other on Zoom every day, and wrestled with all these difficulties and challenges of how to tell a story that spans billions of years."

"No one's ever tried that on television before. How to tell a story with so much science, that no one's tried this before? And I hope we found a way that's enjoyable for the audience."

And when it gets too difficult to explain high-level physics concepts to Netflix audiences, you can always dazzle them with special effects (or hopefully do both at the same time). 3 Body Problem has a huge budget comparable to the one on Game of Thrones, and the team intends to use it. "The reader of the novel is imagining something of a scale unlike anything they've ever read before," Woo said. "So the viewer of the show has to be treated to an experience that they've never seen before. And that it's going to be a big budget, that's going to cost money. If you're going to actualise all the things that you've been imagining as a reader on a screen, that's a big responsibility to do justice to what Liu Cixin wrote."

Liu Cixin wrote three books. Hopefully, the first season goes over well and this team gets to adapt the next two. "If Netflix gives us the number of seasons we need to get to the end, people will care enough about these characters and about their fate," Benioff said.

The first season of 3 Body Problem drops on Netflix on Thursday, March 21.

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