Chinese sci-fi enters pivotal new phase

Sci-fi writer Liu Cixin has said on many occasions that he wanted to see his best-selling novel to date, The Three-Body Problem, portrayed on the big screen, or, preferably, as a TV drama adaptation.

Work on the movie version of the book - which is in fact the first volume of Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, but better known to Chinese readers as the title of the trilogy - began in March 2015, and the film was initially scheduled to be screened in 2016. But despite the high expectations of the Chinese moviegoing public, the release of the movie has been postponed several times since then, and is now not expected until 2019.

Many people, however, remain pessimistic about the quality of the movie, largely because China has so far never produced a successful scifi movie to match the quality of Hollywood offerings such as 2014's Interstellar, 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even this year's Annihilation, which was adapted from the 2015 Nebula Award winner that beat Liu's Three-Body Problem.