Fresh sci-fi with gallons of flair

LONG with Dune and Cloud Atlas, The Three-Body Problem was one of those books once left languishing in the file marked "unfilmable".

- Vicky Jessop

But now, it seems, nothing is unfilmable as those other two works prove -even this story that ranges from alien invasions to the political machinations of communist China and insanely complicated theoretical physics.

It feels like Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss -who created the Netflix series 3 Body Problem alongside Alexander Woo saw Dune and thought, "anything you can do..." While this doesn't reach the heights of Dune it isn't half bad, either. The TV show is loosely adapted from Chinese author Liu Cixin's 2008 novel, which was only translated into English in 2014.

Much of the present-day action is moved away from China to London, where a team of top physicists must reckon with the fact that many of their number are mysteriously dying.