3 Body Problem: Netflix and Game of Thrones creators ruin another beloved book series.

What do you do when science just … breaks? 3 Body Problem isn’t a timid adaptation; in a sense, it’s downright transformative, jettisoning most of the novel’s characters and plucking scenes from all three books in Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Related From Slate The Problem With Dune: Part Two With 3 Body Problem, Benioff and Weiss—along with Woo, who served as showrunner on the second season of AMC’s anthology series The Terror, about the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals during World War II—go off-book from the beginning. The novels’ big ideas, about the relationship between faith and science, individualism and collectivity, are present in 3 Body Problem the way Martin’s plot was in the late seasons of Game of Thrones—as the outline of something that never quite materializes. There’s a hint of something interesting in the way the series draws its cast from across the Asian diaspora—Hong speaks with a New Zealand lilt; Benedict Wong, as a detective investigating the scientists’ deaths, with a Mancunian drawl; and Rosalind Chao, as the present-day expatriate physicist Ye Wenjie, speaks the soft-accented English of someone who hasn’t seen her homeland in decades—especially as later episodes address the issue of a much larger and lengthier migration.