A new comic is the latest variation of Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body Problem” series, which has garnered millions of fans around the world with its alluring apocalyptic vision of humanity facing an eventual alien invasion.
The comic book adaptation scooped up a prestigious Water Drop Award on Saturday at the 2019 China Science Fiction Conference. Its imagery is cold but vibrant, bringing the series to life in a way that is true to the novels’ universe of bleak and beautiful complexity (you can watch a promotional trailer for the comic on Tencent Video here).
The comic version was officially authorized by Liu and developed by Tencent. It’s set for a November 23 release in serialized format on the Tencent Comics app and the Bodong Planet app (both owned by Tencent).
Sci-fi is enormously popular in China, and is currently experiencing something of a renaissance. Much of the genre meditates on typical sci-fi themes like planetary exploration and man’s place among the stars, but Chinese sci-fi has also produced works of biting social critique that likely would not have made it past censors without the cover of imaginary universes.
On China’s sci-fi stage, no other writer is as revered as Liu Cixin, who became the first Chinese author to win the Hugo award when The Three-Body Problem won Best Novel in 2015. His Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, of which The Three-Body Problem is the first novel, had sold over 7 million copies in Mandarin and roughly 700,000 in English by the end of 2017.
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As a result of that unmatched popularity, Liu’s work seems to be in a constant state of adaptation. The “Three-Body” trilogy is also being adapted into a 24-episode miniseries, as well as an animation. Another of Liu’s novels, Ball Lightning, will also be made into a TV series.
Most notably, Liu’s short story The Wandering Earth was adapted into a blockbuster film that earned more than 700 million USD at the box office and became the first Chinese sci-fi film to be released on Netflix.
