Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding, I'm an author, I'm also a director of the Centre. And today I wanted to talk to you about the three-body problem because there has arisen a problem, quite fittingly, with the three-body problem. And this is about the question that's out there. I've seen an article in the Times and an article on Forbes saying that many people are angry, particularly over in China, that the adaptation has moved the novel away from its Chinese roots and made a more global cast. And one of the most obvious changes is a lot of the mystery. Well, the mystery moves on to Oxford and London, places like that, which for a Western audience are more familiar. There has of course been several other adaptations of this novel, which is I've also read the novel. And from the adaptations have been in China, which I've not seen. I think there was a film made that never came out and then a TV series, which apparently was very good, but I haven't seen that. And it got me thinking about what happens when we do adapt a much beloved novel like this and we move it sideways. Is it successful or not? Are we allowed to do that kind of thing or not? Or are the critics right that moving such a book like this away from its Chinese roots is somehow, I suppose the word we've heard before is cultural appropriation or dishonored it in some way. So rather run straight at the three body problem, I thought I would just do a little kind of tour around the universe first, which if you've read the novel is quite appropriate because things do not move in a linear fashion. So let's look at the different things that happen when an adaptation of a fantasy novel in particular moves the location. Now it could be just quite a sort of simple thing where you change one American city for another for filming reasons. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about big shifts. And so I think there is one thing which is really to be encouraged and that's when an adaptation takes the source idea and spins it off into something completely new with a whole different kind of tone. So in this adaptation, your source material is not really an adaptation of that. It's inspired by, which I do know is how Netflix have described on the front cover of the book that inspired the series, which gives you a little bit more room. So what happens when you do that? Well, you can get some amazing things that come out of that. And the one that immediately came to my mind was Blade Runner. Now, if you've read the original short story, 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?' It's absolutely delightful. It is also very funny. It has much more of a sort of, I don't know, almost Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy feel to it because there are absurdities like trying to hide the fact that whether or not the pet is real or not because there is a premium on real organic creatures as opposed to the androids that are proliferating through society. So funny things like that. Tonally very different. So it does actually also move location in that case. I think technically it's moved - I look at my notes here - it's moved to LA from San Francisco. Not a big shift for those of us outside the States, but that's not the important thing that's shifted. It's the freedom that they've thought, well, here's a really interesting idea. Here's an outline of a story. Let's go and make something very different with it. And so both the original story and then the film are both excellent in their own categories. And that's great. I think that's really creative and it means that the film makers have exploited their craft to the full. And I'm sure that the source material doesn't suffer as a result. So that's one category where the change is so big that something new emerges. And in that case, it still remains within America. So you don't have that cultural appropriation problem. But this is where it gets a little bit tricky, isn't it? It's when the change is made to make something more accessible, however that is understood, for an international audience. And when people say an international audience, they very often mean a US audience who have a dominant market, obviously, and where a lot of the funding comes from. So you can see this particularly in children's films. So if you read the Matilda books, Roald Dahl is obviously from a sort of British sensibility. When you get to the Matilda film, like the 1996 and the more modern update, which is a musical, isn't it? You get to a sort of unidentified America. It means that the accents are all over the place. Some of the characters have British accents, some have American accents. It becomes this sort of everywhere. The same is true in the prequel of Wonka that came out this Christmas, which exists in Nowheresville. It feels more American, but it could be a bit Paris. The accents are very mixed. And in a way, it's saying, don't worry about it. Just understand it to be some kind of Western town. But it does mean the specifics of where the story came from in Roald Dahl's imagination are lost. Is that a problem? I don't know. I think that it's undervaluing, maybe, the understanding of the audience. The same team who's made the Wonka film also made Paddington. Paddington never forgets that it's a London-based story. I guess that maybe because the most dominant film in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory universe is the one that Star Gene Hackman. So you've got a sort of Americanization back in the 70s, which has kind of fed through to making that the place most people meet it rather than the book. So you can see how the shift has come. And of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory isn't specific. It does have a feel of every city anyway. So is any damage done? Probably not. I think that's fine. But I would also want to sort of do a shout out for those films which actually lean into where they're from for children. One of the big decisions made when they were thinking of the Harry Potter films, of course, was they were going to cast, this was a J.K. Rowling-led initiative, they wanted to have a sort of British cast, British children playing the main roles. And it seems as though the world has accepted that without struggling. In fact, they've almost enjoyed the weirdness that has come out of the idea of a British boarding school, which isn't immediately understandable in other education systems. So sometimes you can lose what actually is charming about a work if you do take it away from its roots, the sort of deracination effect. But maybe with films which are floating free in a sort of magic world like Wonka and Matilda, yeah, maybe we can live with that. I don't know, I'd be interested to hear what you think of it. Do send messages and let me know what you think. And then we've got the kind of takeover which does feel a bit more like a cultural appropriation, very much to make the American culture dominant. Not always, but I was thinking in a non-fantasy context. You'll remember there was that very popular psychological thriller called Girl on a Train. Now if you read that in the UK, it's very much a London commuter book. Probably was written for that market. When it came to be made into a film, though the main character is Emily Blunt, though the main character remains English, it's moved to New York. I don't get why. It wasn't necessary for the story. It does seem as though it's almost as though maybe it was to make it cheaper to film. I don't know. But it seems as though sometimes don't worry, America is what everybody understands. It feels as though other English speaking cultures are being pushed down. It's weird, isn't it? Though I have seen it the other way around. I was recently watching a thriller that's based on the Harlan Coben series and it's called For Me Once. It's set in the UK. I was watching this and the main character there is an ex-military female soldier who has got into trouble and left under a cloud. Then we've got this psychological thriller about her and members of her family being bumped off. As I was watching it, and it was particularly her relationship with guns, having a sort of very upmarket gun safe in the house, being really keen on carrying lots of guns. Somebody like that in the UK is really strange, really unusual, really stands out, but it wasn't treated as being a particularly problematic thing. Then I went and had a look at where the story comes from. The original setting of the story was America, where indeed rules are different about gun ownership. It doesn't set you apart. It ended up being a kind of red herring because somebody with such a sort of gun culture, gun fixation immediately felt it gave a motive which wasn't actually in the original story. So it skewed the story, which is important in a psychological thriller when you're looking for clues. It can really change how you receive the story when you find that the furniture around it has been moved. It's very oddly disorientating. As soon as I found out, "Oh yeah, this really was set in America originally," it kind of all fell into place. I wonder why they chose to make it in the UK. I imagine that was to do with some sort of deal about where it was cheapest to film, but it was odd, really odd. Let's turn to what I was thinking about, which is the three-body problem. What has happened? The original novel was set mainly in China. It's a very complicated novel to follow, by the way, so I'm not going to attempt to explain the story. There is a phase that's set in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution that remains in the Netflix series. Then there's a plot about a number of contemporary scientists who have been bumped off. That's the bit that's been moved into a Western world, into the British world in fact. That's the bit that is causing the problems. One of the things that's lost from that, of course, is there's an added interest in the novel of how in the Chinese society that has recovered of sorts from the Cultural Revolution, how it goes about investigating scientific, what looks like self-terminations, like suicide. It was actually quite interesting reading a Chinese detective story, which is basically what it is with a fantasy element. That is lost, though the main detective in this is of Chinese origin. Benedict Wong, who I think has been in the Marvel films, so maybe he's based in America. They have kept some of the ethnicities, if not the origins. As a Western person for whom this was probably intended, one of the many audience, I actually found it helpful. As much as I enjoyed the novel, I found the novel quite a tough read. I had to really concentrate. It actually helped me understand the scientific story and the different scientists with this simple change to basically my backyard. I can see why a Chinese viewer might be annoyed. I'm just hoping that the adaptation in the Chinese language that was made is good enough for them not to feel they need this. It might have been a decision that in order to make this excellent story, and there's two more books following on, which hopefully they'll also do. If we do it this way, we'll get the global audience who might not go for a slightly more difficult subject matter. So I find myself thinking actually they've done a good job. There are some ways in which they may have actually even improved on the novel, which sometimes happens in terms of the relatability of the characters. I was talking about this with my son who was the one who put me onto watching this and we were discussing the characters. In the novel, the characters are quite cold. There's a sort of lack of familial warmth and friendship. It was a very suspicious world. By moving it to the context they have in the UK, it's much more a group of friends who aren't perfect by any means. They all have their own little backstory, but they are sort of warmer and you can relate to them and sympathize with them. That isn't to do with the fact it's moved from China to the UK. It's much more to do with whether the characters have been warmed up. They've been made more relatable with more love between them. I think it's where it comes down to basically. They love each other, which is nice because that was a bit lacking from the novel. So in this case, I would say there is a defense to be made by Netflix if they care to do so, which is we know there's been a good Chinese version of this made. We're not trying to remake that. We are actually thinking that this is something that could bring this story to a wider audience by reinterpreting it this way and taking our slice through the material. There are times when you just have to say, well, the book is one thing and the adaptation is another. It's trying to do something different, a bit like the argument about Blade Runner. You may actually end up with something which is better in its own category. So the novel can be a good novel and this can be a good series adaptation. Just to say, of course, that this whole idea of cultural appropriation, let's go back to where we started with this. This is something as old as time. We've been doing this with the stories of other nations forever. Just think of the number of reinterpretations of Greekness. We've talked about Percy Jackson in the last episode, but the retellings of old stories, Shakespeare, all his plays are other people's stories which he's reimagined and reworked. That's good because it's created something new and vibrant in his own voice. In more recent times, there has been this shift to a sort of culturally dominant America. Just think about what happened to the stories of HG Wells. I'm going back to the beginning of cinema. Originally, HG Wells wrote in a British context because the British Empire were top dog at that time. As the century of cinema really got going and you've got people making HG Wells stories such as The Time Machine, which was made in 2002 with a New York setting and then you've got the versions of War of the Worlds. It's been moved to America and that in a way is an interesting... I suppose it shows us the cultural moment we're living in. By reworking and adapting these stories, we find out more about how we frame and shape our own moment. That's what I was thinking about the three-body problem. It is a problem when we take material, but I assume they've taken this material for the three-body problem with the full consent of the author because they are living. It's not so very old novel. They would have signed on the line that they're okay with this. It's not like it's been ripped away from them and shifted without any say-so. As long as there's consent from the person who originally thought up the material, I think actually this isn't a case of the wrong form of cultural appropriation. I think it's a nice form of cultural reinterpretation and I look forward to watching further series of three-body problem. Anyway, I'm sure there are many views on this subject. Particularly if you're passionate about the novel, you may disagree with what I've said because you've been missing things in the series which you love from the novel. But do let me know because I think this is a very lively, ongoing debate about how we use this cauldron of stories that the world gives us and what we dip in and take out. That's how Tolkien phrased it. Thank you very much for listening. 
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