2414- Three-Body (三体 TV Tencent series 2023-)

timespace coordinates: 1960s/70s China (during the Cultural Revolution) to the end of the universe (in the 3rd volume of Remembrance of Earth’s Past – Chinese SF trilogy by Liu Cixin).

Written by	Tian Liangliang
Directed by	Yang Lei and Vincent Yang

I recommend watching the Chinese original first. It has EN subs, it takes a bit to adapt to the pace, designs, and acting styles, jokes, etc. but I guarantee it will be a blast. It was produced by CCTV, Tencent Video, Three-Body Universe, Migu Video, and Linghe Culture and represents a primer in Chinese TV productions. It is fast-paced and edgy, reminding us how similar and cinematic are manhua‘s (or manga/manhwa) and how easy it is to use it as a movie storyboard.

I am tying not to be a purist or a cultural essentialist, od making the case for China’s exceptionalism but let us pause the Netflix inevitability in order to enjoy the original. Yes, it’s spectacular & entertaining, but I think that the UK or Netflix adaptation should be viewed critically on 3 accounts, considering how previous adaptations were quite shallow in comparison with the non-Western Asian originals (not to mention various Techno-Orientalist trappings)

1. Taking into account the previous Hollywood adaptations of Asian horror classics – say The Ring, The Grudge, The Eye, that are not only watered-down, Westernized versions of the original, but they all enact a sort of deletion (becoming canonic) instead of the turning more attention to the original material. Accordingly, this appropriation and adaptation is mostly triggered by money- and catering to Western tastes, ignoring its historically materialist setting – as part of the Japanese Miracle and “Confucian Belt” Tiger Economies (Ju-On, Ringu, Gin gwai respectively) propped up but also disciplined by the US. The same I would argue for the Liu Cixin Remembrance of Earth’s Past – the decision of the producers to place it in the UK rather than China speaks volumes. I mention this while agreeing with the fact that internationalizing such productions is essential to growing their core audience, especially for getting Chinese SF more popular abroad. So, while agreeing it is good to decontextualize the Chinese original, I think that the source material should get more visibility.
2. The original Three-Body (三体) was originally free of charge and available on the YT channel, and it was hailed by some cultural critics as one of the most accurate, adult and canonic SF series ever made. Three-Body (三体) was in complete contrast with the usual (very entertaining but also quite infantilizing) Disney-Lucasfilms SF productions (SW extended universe – think The Mandalorian). Charles Mudede in particular was very vocal in making clear that a Hollywood adaptation would not invest money in a book trilogy that is so complicated, so dark and so complex and stick to it, especially because it “provides a solid introduction to the key ideas of a discipline that went into decline in the US around the mid-1970s, physics.” Well now that series is here, it is time to go for the original.
3. Again, as mentioned previously on Timespacewarps we should not narrow down the scope of our cultural opening. During the XX century the West celebrated China’s “opening up”, which meant opening up to US/Europ-Atlantic liberalism and its financial institutions (see admission into WTO and Clinton’s China Trade Bill speech), but also buying into democratic values, and eventually becoming the World’s Shopfloor. This is not to say we should encourage Chinese exceptionalism. Yet it’s most banal and easy to mold everything into Anglo – American topoi. Ehy try to expunge differences, divergences, and specificities in order to make more of the same for the home market? It the aim – as was the original aim of its producers and ths crazy story behind it – is to produce a similar IP to the Lucasfilm SW, then go ahead – expand the universe! It’s anyway a very narrow and incestuous media world we’re living in. I say this also in regard to the Hollywood Dream factory record of casting incredibly discriminatory and stiff characters in the roles of Asians, Arabs, or Soviets agents during the Cold War. Do we need more Western versions of Asian movies/series or should we help translate or disseminate existing productions more throughly? What the hell happened to Own Voice.

So here is episode 1 of the original Chinese series with pretty decent EN subtitles. It is very high quality and it has a very good cast. The whole story is woven around an interplay btw history (or historical materialism), the natural sciences, and ideology – a debate inaugurated one might say by the paper of Boris Hessen at the 1931 Second International Congress for the History of Science in London where he delivered “The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia Mathematica”.

This series is incredibly paced, and it contains some incredible scenes from the Observatory during the Cultural Revolution – it is really a good way to get acquainted with what would be termed the geo-military concept Third Front – of trying to industrialize China’s rugged interior and agricultural regions, in the midst of a double whammy: the fear of that China’s industrial and military infrastructural core would be vulnerable in the event of invasion by the Soviet Union or air raids by the United States (yeah after the Sino-Soviet split things looked very differently). The series is also an exception in the way it depicts a multiracial, multinational planetary governance that is trying to respond to this alien threat.

After the US rapprochement and as national defense considerations waned, the pace of building up the interior according to  guiding principles of “Close to mountains, dispersed, hidden” (kaoshan, fensan, yinbi) declined and many plants went bankrupt in the 1980s (of course many got built in a hurry and were as a consequence quite defective). This does not mean some of them got an afterlife as private enterprises.

Anyway, it is important to watch such a series and the first batch of 30 eps (!) – out of consideration for its impact in China itself, where the Netflix adaptation is not streaming. Liu Cixin fans and Three-Body fans applauded the TV series on Douban (Rotten Tomatoes and Letterbox in one), where 449,000 viewers gave the show a high rating of 8.7. Below are some posters made for the anniversary edition -combined SF with traditional, vertical Chinese landscape painting, “shanshui hua” (literally painting of mountains, rivers, and cliffs). 

2412 – 3 Body Problem (TV Series 2024-)

timespace coordinates: 1960s/70s China (during the Cultural Revolution)/ 1985 North Atlantic / present day United Kingdom

3 Body Problem is an American science fiction television series created by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss and Alexander Woo, loosely based on the Hugo Award winning Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. It is the second live-action adaptation after the 2023 Chinese television series. It premiered on Netflix on March 21, 2024. (wiki)

imdb   //   Response_in_China

2408 – Origin (2023)

timespace coordinates: 2010’s United States, Germany, India

Origin is a 2023 American biographical drama film written and directed by Ava DuVernay. It is based on the life of Isabel Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she writes the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Over the course of the film, Wilkerson travels throughout Germany, India, and the United States to research the caste systems in each country’s history. (wiki)

imdb   //   rt

2407 – Earth Abides (1949 novel)

timespace coordinates: The novel tells the story of the fall of civilization from deadly disease and the emergence of a new culture with simpler tools. Set in the 1940s in Berkeley, California, the story is told by Isherwood Williams, who emerges from isolation in the mountains to find almost everyone dead.

Earth Abides is a 1949 American post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by George R. Stewart.

In November 1950, the book was adapted for the CBS radio program Escape as a two-part drama starring John Dehner. In early 2024 it was announced that a television adaptation was underway at Amazon MGM Studios.

Major themes   //   wiki   //   goodreads

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“Apparently the processes behind the production of electricity must be almost completely automatic. In the hydro-electric plants the flow of water was still keeping the generators in motion. Moreover, when things had started to go to pieces, someone must have ordered that the street-lights be left turned on.

Now he saw beneath him all the intricate pattern of the lights in the East Bay cities, and beyond that the yellow chains of lights on the Bay Bridge, and still farther through the faint evening mist, the glow of the San Francisco lights and the fainter chains on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Even the traffic-lights were still working, changing from green to red. High upon the bridge-towers the flashes silently sent their warnings to airplanes which would no longer ever be flying.

Even the advertising signs, some of them at least, had been left burning. Pathetically, they flashed out their call to buy, though no longer were there any customers left or any salesmen. One great sign in particular, its lower part hidden behind a near-by building, still sent out its message Drink although he could not see what he was thus commanded to drink.

she watched it, half-fascinated. Drink—blackness. Drink—blackness. Drink. “Well, why not?”“

2124 – Introduction to China’s mysteries (dezarticast 2022)

Out of respect for the majority of our (English-speaking) visitors, I tried to avoid posting Romanian language materials or RO posts. This time I am making an exception – here is a recent talk on the Romanian Youtube Channel Dezarticulat666 I was invited to participate in. They also have a Twitch channel if you practice this sport. Dezarticast has a mind-blowing diverse range of topics, generally focusing on media, environmental politics, environmental justice, labor rights, cultural labor, the so-called ‘creative industries’, openly discussing working conditions, unionization, exploitation and political economy. What I consider vital is their post-ironic, mediatic and tech-savvy approach to all of the above – I think today it is counter-productive (even suicidal) to not be able to discuss current politics, militarism, refugee crisis, populism without taking into account sucy media as comics, movies, musical videos or web03, tech solutionism or crypto scams, or radical UFOlogy, algo-empowered haterizm or meme magick.

While the discussions was free floating and provocative, sure to be controversial take on a few hot topics in today’s multipolar world, there’s a lot left out to be covered in future podcasts, with different guests & and their experiences. I feel highly indebted to A. Rautoiu for making the invitation and for editing the final material. Here is some of the things discussed:

00:00:00 – Intro

00:06:07 – The mazine „New China” (here is a resource of China Reconstructs mag) from the 1980s

00:09:00 – Chinese mass culture in the 1980s Romania

00:12:05 – the 2008 Financial Crisis and how Adi Schiop became interested in China

00:21:03 – Sinophobia and the COVID-19 pandemics

00:22:43 – multidimensional China

00:23:31 – „Maoism a Global History” by Julia Lovell

00:26:10 – „How China Escaped Shock Therapy” by Isabella M. Weber

00:27:06 – Other informational sources about China

00:30:12 – The polycrisis of today’s China

00:35:43 – Chaoyang Trap

00:37:55 – Romanian translations from Chinese literature authors

00:40:12 – Chinese SF, especially Liu Cixin

00:47:20 – The way the CCP incorporates criticism & dissent

00:50:41 – Dissidence and popular resistance against the party

00:56:52 – China’s relation with the rest of the world as compared to now

01:03:01 – Maoism in the rest of Asia

01:06:54 – Asian states that developed under dictatorships (including a dirigiste tech leveraging by state institutions establishing development goals in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea)

01:10:34 – Sinophobia in a larger context of anti-Asian xenophobia

01:16:24 – Conclusions

Other China resources:

Sixth Tone (news culture, politics, trends, economy, trends, etc.) this is one of the few very good portals on lots topics including LGTBQ+ and feminist issues as well as daily aspects of life in China.

Sofia Horta’s TW (Bloomberg) weekly thread on China’s economy, policies, stocks, trends her bombardmenf article again gives me the impression that it’s about China’s importance (or risk management) in Western (investors) eyes, still its vital to keep track and put on these “glasses”.

Global Times (PRC official positions, foreign policy, analysis, etc) it might seem like opaque if one does not actually read btw the lines, yet again it is one of these rare insider perspectives. It also offers quick short 3m videos with recent news (similar to Scmp). Invaluable as to official party line I would say.

South China Morning Post (news portal, international and China news, HK Asia and China focused) as Adi S s-a d its already part of the Alibaba consortium and has a certain independence and works as permitted alternative to the above.

Discourse Power substack (by Tuvia Gering a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, and a Tikvah’s Krauthammer Fellow, specializing in Chinese security and foreign policy, and emergency and disaster management.). It’s about ‘discourse power’ – and how this is becoming a job advertising the capacity to read China’s entrails. I am pretty cautious of such efforts (since there’s always a bidding going on) but i appreciate the translation effort.

2047 – Ted K (2021)

timespace coordinates: 1980’s -90’s Lincoln, Montana

Ted K is a 2021 American historical crime drama film directed, co-produced and co-written by Tony Stone, starring Sharlto Copley as the titular character. The film depicts the true story of Ted Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, and the events leading to his arrest. (wiki)

imdb

2033 – The Spine of Night (2021 animation)

timespace coordinates: an imaginary mythical time on a violent forlorn planet, not very unlike our own.

“The Spine of Night is a 2021 adult animated dark fantasy horror film written and directed by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King.^[1] It stars Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, and Joe Manganiello.

The film was completed using rotoscoped animation, and traces the centuries long journey of a magical plant that bestows terrible power upon the user, as it inspires despots, empires, and black magic.” (wiki)

This has to be one of the highlights of animation in recent years – but not if one dreams for a more peaceful, pacifist or a non-violent (better) world. Ripping hearts out, dissolving meat off the bones, cutting people in half or dismemberment – a recurrent and very common characteristic of Spine of the Night. Lots of eerie blue phosphorescent flowers and lots of gaping skulls projected on starry skies. Heroic fantasy or sword & sorcery (especially the work of REH/R.E. Howard) was big bang moment for me and it was always pretty bloody and tactless. Altough, I must say it came with its own culturally specific ‘mirth’ – for these imaginary worlds were concocted by REH, and distributed by (Marvel) comics before the books came around (few of those in my collection too). Worlds I briefly inhabited got poached from smuggled comic books (Savage Sword of Conan, King Conan, Conan the Barbarian) arriving in ‘aid packages’ from my aunt in the US across the Iron Curtain to a kid in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Conan the Barbarian and King Kull of Valusia happen to overlap with my 1980s high school surroundings or my sporadic countryside haunts. Below the Carpathian mountains, around Prahova County, a wild distant hilly forested area, that I entered only much later was just behind the village of my childhood summer vacations. Let’s get this straight I wasn’t a country side kid, more of a city bookworm/documentary geek. Altough from that moment on the hills of Prahova became the realm of Cimmeria – the mythical land of Conan, a place based on a vague Black Sea region during the Greek antiquity.

“CIMMERIA (cca 1932)

by REH

I remember
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds’ leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

Vista upon vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista–hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills, To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,

How many deaths shall serve to break at last

This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts?  I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night”

The gravel on top of the gymnastics/sports hall next to my Bucharest school was strewn with small bones of dead animals. This made a perfect substrate for our Hyborian immersion. To that place where nobody could follow us, we arrived climbing up on a creaky rusty metal ladder – and in the distance we started seeing the rooftops shapes and church towers that would transform into temples of Mitra…

Conan, King Kull, Valeria, Thulsa Doom, Red Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), Grace Jones playing Zula (all pulled from a growing comic book pantheon enlarged by Roy Thomas & Barry-Windsor Smith and others) ended up bringing havoc to an old and corrupt world, swept by sinister cults and pre-human civilisations with walled crumbling cities. These were all heroines and heroes that made civilized life into a sham, never adopting the mores for civilized men and women for long. All thieves, all brigands, tomb raiders, all hailing from the borderlands, the steppes and the forests, all former slaves, orphans or members of a barbarian hinterland that got raided as labor force pool or got sacrificed in the name of unknown gods or blood-thirsty cults. A pean to a neo- barbarian ethos born out of modern Fantasy that did not exist outside the invented Hyborian Age conjured up by that suicidal pulp fiction-writing Texan obsessed with physical culture called Robert E. Howard. There is much to be critical about it now – including a certain Social Darwinist bent – and a kind of might is right. At the same time there’s a sort of materialist common sense attitude of swords that make Gods or tyrants bleed, of sorcery or supernatural or Lovecraftian entities that are not invincible. So there’s always the risk of maybe too much sword and too little sorcery. On the scala of toxic masculinity many abcelebrated Frank Frazetta cover would score pretty high and come across as just reinforcing gender stereotypes, seemingly promoting those undultared, manly, virile, battle-scarred bodies forged in cosmic foundries – at the time of great changes of Fordism labor rights struggles and post-Fordist malaise. Those sweaty – sword wielding (working man) recently unemployed bodies that are so easy to ridicule in movies, as in the recent lumberjack character played with gusto by Nicholas Cage in Mandy. Work and virility was somehow on the go – labor was not only outsourced to a feminized Asia, but the whole regime of formerly unwaged labour, care work included more and more men – a feminization of work that started seeping into what had been once a working class industrial preserve.

Even with the heroic fantasy glorification of berserk battles, heavy metal/doom metal soundtrack & general mayhem, let’s also consider Conan the Barbarian mostly a kind of modern scavenger, a sort of Spartacus outsider that never accepted a warrior lifestyle and that was forced into it. From his initial peaceful village life Conan (in one account) was taken prisoner with other children, was pushed and had to adopt a slave – warrior livelihood, not because he was born into it. Conan used all his anger to mostly strike down civilized lords, power hungry priests and cruel rulers.

Now to this recent animation and how it departs from previous models even if stylistically has much in common with a whole genre of pulp. First in the Conan comics there’s is a certain class and even racial division amongst these pulp savages and barbarians. This is a recognizable colonial (Euro-American) separation of good barbarians vs bad barbarians – even in Conan THE Barbarian. There is the ‘noble savage’ and the rest, an Enlightment era division that has brought much misery and death to countless living native indigenous peoples. So in the comics there is “the Cimmerians” and there is “the Picts” of the Pictish Wilderland (usually a swamp or a jungle rainforest) as par of an extended REH universe. Classified as ‘primitive’, truly vicious they are almost like living examples of Darwinian evolutionary atavism. They are the remains of pulp racist pseudo science, representatives of the irrational primitive archetype, described in dehumanizing terms, as an animal-like – superstitious horde. I think The Spine of Night – even if at the surface tributary to REH universe does a benefic move towards foregrounding these reclusive swamp ‘savages’, their cause, the quest not of warriors or swordsmen but of witches, of pantheist and animist rituals. It also makes explicit the predatory relation of much of these civilisations & cities on this sparsely populated, un-cultivated, yet fertile hinterland. This I consider quite a big departure that puts to shame simplistic pulp comic divisions with a colonial inheritance. The Swamp is finally not a place of unnamed horrors like in Conan the Barbarian, but a place of various forms of life and where a very powerful plant thrives, a plant that is part of the ethno-botanical lore of these human groups. The horror is most likely to arrive with new intrusions, clearings, enclosures and with militaristic ecocidal ideology of brutal conquerors and their henchmen. I sense there’s a possible Bachofenian critique of patriarchy as a historical process, the arrival of a patriarchal order that took pride in treating both nature and women with the same brutality & rapacity. There’s also no passivity here – the swamp people don’t just dissappear and the witch is always coming back and ready to counter the worst of them.

Beside the knowledge vs power narrative there is something else in the Spine of Night – a way in which the great Swamp – is the first to disappear or to fall victim to the empires or to fires, and expansive drives for domination.

Another thing is the dependency of civilization, of the mighty on someone else, even on rare irretrievably lost knowledge, or on something that is non-human (or pre-human) or not recognized any longer as human. Rulers are always dependent on inhuman energies and entities. Or even better – in all their might they show a dependence and encourage the exploitation of a complex – nexus of other humans, their lore and practices and plants (magic flower) & biodiverse environments (swamp, wetlands, marshes). There is no development or spells or even warfare without these (one might recall here Londa S. studies of abortificient plants known to indigenous peoples as well as slaves) ‘political plants’ that are an integral lore of these swamp people in The Spine of Night.

It is the first epic time the actual heroine is a swamp witch, her quest is not the quest of the mercenary barbarian but of a revived cosmic witch queen that makes the last stand against a technologically- empowered, resource-hungry, and knowledge thirsty imperial power represented by a man, a former scholar. I am not going into details – and I think the images telling the mythical story of this bloody world are pretty telling because they include the killing of the gods in its cosmogony.

Knowledge or – ancient libraries and scholars are not all evil and corrupt, there is actually a few idealists left and a few dedicated to saving the plebs outside the gate. Yet it is clear that this kind of disdain combined with hoarding of knowledge in search of power brings only doom & destruction. There is also a knowledge that is non-literary, transmitted by oral cultures, what we might call oral/aural culture – so-called illiterate knowledge, one that does not get recorded so easily in the pages of grimoires. Besides the pungent mythical undertones in Spine of the Night – there is also the sense that a lot of specialized, ‘written’ knowledge is definitely growing in complete disregard for its human (humanistic) usage.

Apart of all these brief notes – the Spine of Night animation conveys the best cosmic dark epic doom entertainment since Ralph Bakshi’s collaboration with Frank Frazetta – on Ice and Fire, the 1983 dark epic fantasy rotoscoping masterpiece. Yet, I repeat I do not consider it a mere piece of geek nostalgia per se – but a powerful new and welcome turn of an old animation technique (to be enjoyed and practiced). Visually it is not so much – like a lot of recent animation – one technique, but a kaleidoscope of techniques and technologies both digital & analog, hand-drawn & CGI, combining ‘realist’ rotoscoping style with abstract – dark silhouettes with blazing eyes and patches of ‘bioluminescent’ parafernalia (like characters in the cosmogonic/Titanomachy scenes). Instead of just images of decay, or constant dissolution of forms – animation in Spine of Night is mostly about metamorphoses (like Levitt puts it in her Animatic Apparatus), morphing and melting the boundaries of usual anthropomorphic – figurative shapes. The background art is very effective and stands on its own even without the action – because all the environmental elements are unstable, lines tremble, the sky/cosmos constantly is prone to paraeidolia – skulls get distended & extended into galaxies. One could say in the Titanomachy – god killing scenes, what we see is a cosmogony of the animation process itself, the unseen acts (techniques, technologies, rotoscoping etc) enacting the ani-motion principle, “the artificing of man” (Cholodenko) – the dreams of silent creators, lively nightmarish creations that overtake and revert the roles, rob their creators special effects & take on a life of their own.

imdb