3 Body Problem (2024)

Netflix's *3 Body Problem* adapts Liu Cixin's novel of the same name^[1], developed by the *Game of Thrones* creators with Alexander Woo^[4]. It opens during China's Cultural Revolution, when a secret radar base beams a message into space and unwittingly reaches the dying civilization of the San-Ti. Unlike most UFO stories, the aliens don't descend in flying saucers: they first send "sophons" — subatomic probes that freeze human physics and watch the planet — while their actual fleet is still four centuries away. Contact here is not a sighting in the sky but a multi-generational war of science and psychology.