How do you solve a Problem like the human race?

NETFLIX'S 3 BODY PROBLEM MIGHT BE THE BIGGEST TV series to hit Earth this year.

- JUDY BERMAN

The science-fiction epic unites Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss with The Terror: Infamy co-creator Alexander Woo in an adaptation of one of the 21st century's most celebrated books.

Chinese author Cixin Liu's Hugo-winning The ThreeBody Problem-published in his home country in 2006, then expanded into a trilogy that has been translated into dozens of languages-is a fascinating novel of ideas. The cover of the American edition boasts an endorsement from Barack Obama, who calls it "wildly imaginative." It certainly is. Choppily written, dense with theoretical physics and philosophy, and dependent on the depiction of an alien race whose physical form is never described, the book also poses unique challenges for anyone looking to adapt it for the screen. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo have been remarkably successful at transforming Liu's work into a gripping sci-fi thriller without either dumbing it down or boring viewers with hours' worth of whiteboard lectures.

The first of two interconnected storylines, set decades apart, follows a brilliant young astrophysicist, Ye Wenjie (played by Zine Tseng and later Rosalind Chao), during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. After the revolutionaries' anti-intellectual reign of terror destroys her family and an encounter with Rachel Carson's contraband Silent Spring further inflames her pessimism about the human race, Ye is recruited to work at a remote, mountaintop military base on a secret initiative known as Red Coast. One choice she makes there will reverberate around not just around the globe, but also the universe.