China’s First Homegrown Sci-Fi Film Struggles to Market

President Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have already read the book, but they will have to wait until next year to catch the motion picture adaptation of The Three Body Problem (三体), one of China’s most hotly anticipated films.

As a book, the sci-fi story took China by storm with its depiction of a surreal virtual reality world mixed in with the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution. The highly original story even saw Liu Cixin become the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award.

The success of the story soon prompted Liu to adapt it into not just a film, but also a video game, with Liu becoming both “Art Director of the movie and Cloud Architect of the game,” according to a press release in December.

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