|
Lampsacus posted:There is going to be some 2nd book stuff in the first season right? They won't be able to help themselves rushing into the goooood stufff One of the episode titles is a term that doesn't appear until book 2
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2024 08:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 19:45 |
|
|
I'm ok with it not being completely faithful to the book. Despite my own weird tastes I can accept that most people don't want a TV show that is 75% physicists talking to each other about physics Any concerns I have are down to the creators and how bad the latter half of GoT was, along with being extremely dubious about dudes who wanted to make an alt history American civil war show that was covered in red flags before anything had even been filmed
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2024 09:18
|
|
|
https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/shows/3-body-problem-review-netflix-adaptation-bore-1234961409/quote:Critics of Benioff and Weiss will also note plenty of old issues popping up again. There are confounding changes to a beloved book series (I cannot imagine these new characters going over well), indelicate handling of racial and gender dynamics (the remaining Chinese characters in this once fully-Chinese story are barely developed, outright villainous, or both) I can't say I'm surprised
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2024 08:53
|
|
|
Wii Spawn Camper posted:Never heard of the books, watching this now. Super interesting premise and very well done, but (ep 5 spoilers) the thing with the ship and nano fibers was really dumb, it looked cool but what was the point? To prevent them from destroying evidence? How’d they know the fibers wouldn’t chop it up? Curious if it made more sense in the book or maybe I missed something? It’s like they saw Ghost Ship and wanted to dial it up to 11. In the book they discuss the optimum spacing of the nanowires and the distance they choose is small enough to kill someone lying down and large enough that even if the storage device is cut in half they could reconstruct the data. It's framed as a necessary risk and they know it has a chance of going wrong e: and you got the point of it right, they're trying to kill everyone on board in such a short timeframe that no one will be able to destroy the data Tarnop fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Mar 22, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 09:01
|
|
|
Wii Spawn Camper posted:Thanks for the explanation, I’m still not buying it but I’m just not gonna let it bother me. When I was reading the book I remember thinking "oh come on" but then the way it is described is so cool that I gave it a pass. It definitely felt like a kind of forced way to make the nanowire research relevant. I'm not up to that episode in the show so I'm interested to see how it plays out
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 09:12
|
|
|
Wii Spawn Camper posted:Question for book readers, how much of the China scenes were changed? Is it pretty much the same or was it very different? It really felt like it was saying “China bad” and there weren’t any scenes in modern China to say something like “things were bad, but now it’s better” or anything like that. I may have missed it though, gonna need to rewatch the last 2 episodes because I also stayed up late binging it. In the book, all of the scenes that the TV show sets in the UK happen in China
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 18:32
|
|
|
The book talks about the fact that specific starting configurations have been solved by brute force but no general solution exists. In the book the Trisolarans have developed sufficient ability to predict the movement of their suns such that they no longer get completely wiped out by a bad chaos era. However, their long term problem is that every other planet in the system has already been consumed by one of the suns and they know it's just a matter of time until theirs goes too. Solution to the three body problem or no, they still need to gtfo
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 19:14
|
|
|
DrHammond posted:I enjoyed the books a lot, one reason being it does a good job of bread-crumbing the answer to the mystery so that by the time the reader is given the explicit reveal, it's more filling in some gaps and confirming the readers suspicions than it is a big reveal. Yeah a big part of this in the books is that a lot of the time it's physicists of various specialisations talking to each other about what they're experiencing and what they think might be happening in the context of their field of understanding, or just thinking about this stuff by themselves. A huge amount of that was (and perhaps had to be) removed in adaptation so you end up with two problems: much of the science is treated like magic and you don't really get that Sherlock Holmes feeling of trying to work things out before a generally smart character beats you to it. Ideas are seeded sometimes hundreds of pages in advance, you really get time to work your brain. My biggest problem with this adaptation is that they shifted that time towards a bunch of character interaction and relationship development, and I haven't find that trade off to be worth it so far
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 20:21
|
|
|
There's a lot to forget, they're pretty dense books. I read them less than a month ago specifically because I wanted to read them before watching this adaptation, so they're fairly fresh in my mind
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 20:37
|
|
|
deported to Canada posted:I'm not a scientist but part of me thinks if they could do that already then the 3 body problem wouldn't be an issue at all. Being able to predict that their planet will be swallowed by one of their suns doesn't actually stop that from happening. They're able to predict chaotic and stable periods to the point where they're no longer at risk of being wiped out in the same way that earlier generations were, as we see in the game. But their planet is still going into a sun eventually. They know that it happened to all the other planets in their system. So they have to leave before it happens to them
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 01:32
|
|
|
cant cook creole bream posted:See my post on the previous page. I edited it a bit to explain that stuff as far as I understand it. It was a very helpful post
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 01:38
|
|
|
I guess the other thing about the quantum entanglement handwave for FTL communication is that the limitations we are discussing are based on the knowledge we have about quantum particles right now. Just as Newtonian mechanics turned out to be a very good approximation until Einstein came along, it may be the case that somewhere on the path between discovering general relativity and harnessing the ability to unfold 11 dimensions of a proton to inscribe a supercomputer on its surface, currently unknown physical behaviours and properties will be discovered. Which gives the author a bit of wiggle room
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 01:49
|
|
|
The thin dimensions idea sounds familiar and I agree it's one of those things that sounds ridiculous because it falls into the realm of Russell's Teapot except even worse because definitionally you can't prove it exists Interesting to think about though, especially with how the theme of hypothesis vs empiricism runs through the whole trilogy
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 02:42
|
|
|
BastardySkull posted:I really enjoyed them so each to their own. They are probably the best bits of the first book other than the stuff at Red Coast, especially the human computer Yeah they're a big part of the deliberate pacing of the book, and the show really hosed up the pacing Fister Roboto posted:100% agreed. I had this exact same thought while watching the first episode. When I read the book, I thought it was an interesting insight into a place and era that I didn't know very much about, and what I did know came through the lens of American capitalist propaganda. Making the "good guys" all westerners completely changes the meaning of that, even if the suffering that Ye Wenjie experienced in the show was no better or worse than in the book. That wouldn't keep the theme intact, because the point is to draw a parallel between the cultural revolution and the sophon interference both suppressing scientific development (as well as setting up her motivation of course)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 20:27
|
|
|
uXs posted:Then again, she also literally lives in the UK so she's just as westernized as everybody else. No she isn't
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 22:35
|
|
|
This is a good post and I appreciate the effortful reply. I think there is something there with the parallel uses of scientific suppression, but it's book 3 spoilers: In the first book I feel like we're invited to consider what it says about society that is willing to suppress the pursuit of science due to perceived conflict with their immediate goals, if that same suppression is such a potent weapon of conquest when wielded against them by an external force. When we learn more about Trisolaran society during the deterrence era, we find out that their society doesn't really have much in the way of autistic expression because it was culturally suppressed as a distraction from the goal of survival. I felt like it was then implied that their relative artistic immaturity was why they couldn't identify the messages hidden in the three fairy tales. The two scenarios don't map to one another exactly but I felt like there was something there about societies being vulnerable to attacks that they are willing to self-inflict. Maybe I'm seeing something that isn't there but it resonated with me when I read it. The books are full of things like that though, I remember drawing all sorts of weird connections as I was reading them
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 23:22
|
|
|
arrowdust posted:Finished the first season. Enthralling stuff. They know where the fleet is coming from because they can see the trails the ships leave through interstellar dust clouds Steve Yun posted:Amazing typo I assume my phone's autocorrect knows what website I'm on
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 23:35
|
|
|
arrowdust posted:But not the ships themselves? Correct
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 23:39
|
|
|
arrowdust posted:Huh. That sounds like a dodgy plot contrivance but thanks for the info. Imagine a bullet being shot through a room filled with smoke. Much easier to see the wake than the bullet itself. Now imagine that cloud of smoke is in the vacuum of space with nothing to stop the disturbance expanding indefinitely. In the book, by the time Earth detects it, the trail left in the dust has expanded to the size of Jupiter
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 00:00
|
|
|
For more on question two, click the spoiler tags on my conversation with arrowdust. There are no spoilers there if you've finished the series, it's just extra detail from the books
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 00:32
|
|
|
Cimber posted:1) Ok, so no one else in the world caught the messages going back and forth? I mean the scientists in Ohio got the WOW! signal too. If they are transmitting that much I can't imagine no one else would have heard it There's nothing wrong with your line of thinking here on most of these questions. Many of them are unanswered at this point and you should follow your instinct to read the books IMO. Specifically regarding the technology stuff: The sophons could relay back any technological advancements that we made, yes. But the ships they're sending are going to take over 400 years to get to us. So if we develop hyper advanced weaponry then they could copy it and fit it to some ships that would take another 400 years to get to us. By which time we might have surpassed them again. As long as we don't develop propulsion tech that would let them get here any faster then they're always 400 years behind. So why risk it when they know exactly what scientific avenues we would have to pursue to catch up with them (fundamental particle theory) and can just block development down that path. The problems presented by the huge amount of time interstellar travel takes run through the whole series, it tends to be a staple of harder sci fi
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 00:43
|
|
|
Cimber posted:Thanks. I hate overthinking a book and then wondering if its a plot hole or a really subtle clue of real intentions. We don't know one way or another. This plot point will be picked up again later
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 00:59
|
|
|
The aliens didn't make the game, the ETO did This is a minor book spoiler. It's something that has been made clear by the point the show is up to, but I guess the show doesn't cover it: They don't understand lying because they don't communicate verbally. IIRC their thoughts are basically just broadcast to everyone around them, so the idea of concealing your thoughts from someone else is completely alien (hah) to them. They're not that dumb, because even though lying as a concept is completely incompatible with their physiology and society, they immediately realise the implications of humans being able to lie
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 01:24
|
|
|
Updog Scully posted:I know that this has already been answered but there's another, more simple answer: they know which star system the aliens are coming from, so they know shooting it towards the star system will allow them to intercept it. Yeah this is a good point and it's weird that they skipped over this in the show. IIRC it's that there's only one trinary system at the exact distance implied by the delay between the broadcast off the sun and the "don't respond" message. Seems like something that could have been part of the Staircase proposal scene, it's not like the last three episodes are pushed for time
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 08:55
|
|
|
I finished watching this a couple of days ago and I wanted to let my thoughts settle a bit before posting. This is going to seem like I'm doing nothing but making GBS threads on the show, but if you read this please assume that I generally liked the parts that I don't criticise. I enjoyed watching it and I hope they finish the series. First off, I don't know what the story gains from being transplanted to England. I liked that the books were set somewhere that is new and interesting to me. I couldn't care less about London or Oxford as a setting. I couldn't stand most of the Oxford Five. Jin was the only one I was happy to see on screen and the only character shuffle/recombination that I think was successful. I think I just disliked the time wasted in trying to make them into more fleshed out characters. I don't think it was particularly successful, the performances were kind of flat and one note, and material I enjoyed in the books was removed to make room for it. Just as an example, when the countdown appears in the book, the character affected is freaked out but treats it like a scientist would; they conduct experiments, test hypotheses, apply the scientific method as much as they're able to. Auggie looks teary-eyed into the middle distance a lot and is sad about it. Nothing about the way she deals with it makes me think “this person is a world class scientist who is a threat to invading aliens” We've discussed pacing already in this thread and I think it's the worst thing about this adaptation. The books give you time to really think about what might be happening, the implications and possibilities. They're full of little bits of foreshadowing and repeated imagery and the occasional red herring. Like a good mystery they make you feel like an active participant. The series rushes to the end of episode 5 (great episode, worth watching the series just for this) and then almost grinds to a halt for three episodes. For a sci-fi series, it treats science with an incredible amount of disdain. The book presents science as a magnificent and terrifying puzzle to be unlocked and draws the reader into the problems characters are working on. In the show, science is either magic or a series of big words you say to someone to make them look stupid. I could tell this was made by the people who made Game of Thrones because, just like that show, this adaptation changes or introduces a bunch of stuff in a kind of thoughtless way and a lot of the changes undermine not just the themes but the basic plot. We've seen quite a few posts itt where people have asked “if they can do x, why not just do y” and the answer is almost always that X is something the show added or changed without thinking through the consequences. The VR units being alien tech, sophons hacking planes, the Judgment Day sequence being shot in a way that undermines the plan they chose. This also introduces another problem which has come up a few times in this thread: in the books there are characters who make bad decisions or come up with bad plans that still produce results that end up being useful later. When the adaptation introduces a bunch of weird inconsistencies, it becomes hard to distinguish between characters messing up and the writers messing up. Here are some positives: I thought the way the world of the game was presented was great. It looked almost exactly how I imagined it which is always a nice feeling. I thought it was a nice touch to use it as a way to introduce (book 2 spoiler) the character Sophon because when she shows up in the book as a fully formed weeb OC it's a little jarring. Jin was a genuinely good character and way more interesting than the 1.5 book characters she replaced. Episode 5, while kind of goofy in some ways, was pretty thrilling TV. The show sold the emotional core of Will's story better than the book, although I didn't think much of the actor and his one facial expression. Liam Cunningham was good as Wade. As I said, it probably seems like I'm being pretty harsh on it but overall I'm glad I watched it and am frankly amazed that it turned out even watchable considering the clusterfuck of the last 40-ish episodes of Game of Thrones. I hope we get the full adaptation, there's a lot more I'd like to see. Especially (book 3 megaspoilers, absolutely do not click) the chapter where a bottom rung space flunky on a ship half a galaxy away flicks a piece of paper at us that flattens the whole solar system
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 18:25
|
|
|
Some Guy TT posted:Why Oxford was something that bugged me too, not because I had a bee in my bonnet about the setting not being China, but because I couldn't really think of any obvious reason why London specifically was supposed to be this big hub of cutting edge technology. Do they do a lot more sciency stuff there than I realized, or is this more a matter of the showrunners just thought the characters would sound smarter if they had British accents? Oxford and Cambridge universities these days are mostly notable for routinely turning out some of the most obnoxious people in Britain but Oxford professors have won Nobel prizes. The most recent thing I could find was pioneering work on how antibodies function in the late sixties. Also there is a large particle accelerator in Oxford so that obviously helps for story purposes. The oldest universities in England are sort of equivalent to the US ivy league schools in that they will automatically be considered more prestigious by people in fields like law and politics. Oxford and Cambridge are kind of like our Harvard and Stanford, with all that implies and the addition of hundreds of years of weird traditions
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 18:53
|
|
|
Nice Tuckpointing! posted:Three of the Oxford 5 don't have British accents. The more prestigious English universities attract a lot of students from overseas, so I didn't find that unusual
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 19:02
|
|
|
Nice Tuckpointing! posted:Yes, but kinda puts the kibosh on whole British accents sounding smart reasoning. Oh right yeah, I forgot the possibility that you were responding to someone other than me lol
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 19:07
|
|
|
Avasculous posted:Oh, my bad. It has been a long time since I read them and I forgot about that. I read the books within the last month and I don't remember any hacking like they demonstrated with the cars and the plane. They can read digital information, they can affect what people see, and they can communicate which allows them to use human proxies. Their ability to actually physically affect their environment is limited to subatomic manipulation, hence the whole particle accelerator thing. I don't know enough about electronics to know if that would let them change the behaviour of circuits, but they don't do that in the books as I recall. Even the "you're all bugs" message is done in the same way as the countdown, people see it directly in their field of vision
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 20:59
|
|
|
SimonChris posted:The cars were explicitly said to be autonomous self-driving cars. Presumably, they can't hack vehicles with human drivers / pilots. Cars have used engine management computers for decades now. Fly by wire has been a thing since the moon landings
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 21:10
|
|
|
Boris Galerkin posted:If they can manipulate "subatomic particles" then why can't they manipulate macroscopic things like electronics (the show shows that they can) or biology (the show shows that they can't)? It literally makes no sense. We are all made up of the same "subatomic particles" (fields, rather). "The show says they can" is the whole problem. The books are pretty consistent about their limitations, the show just says gently caress it, do what looks cool and expect people to not think about it. I'm not claiming that the books are some unimpeachable fortress of science and logic, but they do treat all of this with more care than the show
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 21:36
|
|
|
Mantle posted:If they are able to exert positive control over a car's electronics, that is way more powerful than only needing to exert negative control over a plane in order to make it crash. And once you're at that point why not just gently caress with the electrical signals in Saul's brain and stop his heart beating
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 00:13
|
|
|
D&D definitely reacted to internet criticism of GoT so I wouldn't be shocked if at some point next season the murderer girl whose name I've forgotten looks into that camera and says "I'm so glad that the sophons taught me how to hack into self driving cars and also aeroplanes, just a shame all the firmware manufacturers have updated their encryption and also I called the sophons dickheads so now they're not talking to me any more and I must return to my home planet byeeee" Or they'll ignore it because gaping plot holes generate YouTube explainer videos with arguments in the comments section and that's engagement baby
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 00:22
|
|
|
I decided to re-read the chapter of the first book where the aliens build the sophons, because I was pretty sure they discussed their capabilities in lots of detail. I'll stick it behind spoiler tags in case people are planning on reading the book The chapter is presented as a conversation between their chief scientist and a bunch of other high ranking officials. They explain that the sophons are designed and programmed to do five things: - they can insert themselves into particle accelerators and anticipate the movement of the particle being accelerated so that the sophon ends up being the thing it collides with. They can then emit fake results, and they can reconstitute themselves after collision - they can emulate the behaviour of photons, causing reactions on photographic film and retinas - in a pair, they can sense electromagnetic radiation, allowing them to function as observers of basically everything but our thoughts - they have full control and awareness over all of their higher dimensional structure, and can unfold into higher and lower dimensions at will, allowing them to block electromagnetic radiation but rendering themselves extremely vulnerable to attack - They can communicate instantly with their quantum entangled counterparts on Trisolaris. The book even makes a bit of an attempt to explain how. It's because the sophon is sapient and has full awareness of its own quantum properties. Having watched that video linked upthread this isn't all that convincing but this is the wild sci-fi stuff and it's internally consistent at least All of this is explained in a lot more detail than I've gone into here, and I would absolutely recommend reading it. They definitely can't control computers, speak through speakers or control TVs. All communication to Mike Evans from Trisolaris is done by the same retinal writing as the countdown
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 01:30
|
|
|
bawfuls posted:Didn't they have a more extended conversation in the books than what was depicted in the show? Like she tells him directly to study "cosmic sociology" and gives him a set of axioms to ponder. Correct. Book 2 spoilers: The axioms are - Survival is the primary need of civilisation - Civilisations expand and require increasing resources but the matter in the universe is constant and finite And she also asks him to think about two other concepts that she doesn't explain - The chain of suspicion - Technological explosion The show drops an extra clue with the titles of the books Ye Wenjie is reading after she finds out the aliens think we're bugs. One is Game Theory, the other is Fermi Paradox. I wish they hadn't just stuck a book called Fermi Paradox on screen though because the Wikipedia article has a Dark Forest section that directly references these books in a way that's pretty spoilery for anyone who might see those titles and Google them
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 01:40
|
|
|
PostNouveau posted:No, I'm trying to think of something dumber in the books and I cannot. It is supremely stupid in the books as well. There's even a chapter in book 3 where the main character reflects back on the project as something revealing of humanity's incredible naivety and how utterly unprepared they were for what was to come. This is kind of what I was alluding to earlier when I said that the bad writing and logic holes of the show make it harder to spot when something is a bad idea in fiction vs the writers just loving up
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 01:52
|
|
stuff
|
Wii Spawn Camper posted:I liked Saul from the start because I also like to smoke weed and drop acid Yup, there's a lot of physics chat in the books and most of book one is, from what I understand, reasonably accurate when talking about actual real world physics but as soon as we get to alien physics it's extremely fantastical extrapolation from things that are already hypothetical. See earlier chat in the thread about higher dimensions and quantum entanglement. The books keep talking about science in the same tone all the way through, so the real-world stuff in the beginning softened me up sufficiently that by the time it's all "we unwrapped a proton and inscribed an AI supercomputer on its surface" I was like gently caress yeah dude (possibly related to the first half of your post)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 02:03
|
|
|
PostNouveau posted:the political machinations up until then just fall out of the sky like it's the will of God. Perfectly on theme!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 02:11
|
|
|
Ccs posted:Oh I meant Will Downing. I misread an earlier post. I liked Wade, he was basically all plot, but the actor did a great job selling it. But Will and Saul were just sort of there, part of the gang but not active participants in the larger struggle up until the last minute. They're characters that don't show up until the later books (the story is told in a much more straightforward chronological order in the show, we've seen material from all three books so far) so during the first 5 - 6 episodes they're at the writing mercy of the people who brought us Game of Thrones season 8
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 02:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 19:45 |
|
|
Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Was the "aliens can't grasp metaphor" thing from the book? Because that seems like a proper weakness. Like sure we have our wallfacer program and it's fine but also coincidentally we're sponsoring a multi trillion dollar effort to make a plan to deal with 30 year cicadas that I'm sure the aliens will find quite boring. Nope. In the book, Mike Evans is talking to them about language and they bring up the subject of synonyms. They tell him that they first thought "think" and "say" were synonyms but have realised from context they're not. He asks them some questions about how they communicate and as he starts to realise what's going on he tells them the story of Red Riding Hood as an experiment to test his hypothesis. So that's basically it, think and say are the same thing to them. Nothing about not understanding metaphors. They can't lie to each other because they would also communicate the fact that they were lying at the same time as the lie itself. The important realisation is the same, that they can no longer trust anything humans have told them, but the extra cruft is all D&D Tarnop fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Mar 26, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 04:43
|
|