TV adaptation of award-winning Chinese sci-fi novel coming soon

The highly anticipated Chinese TV adaptation of Liu Cixin's Hugo Award-winning sci-fi novel "The Three-Body Problem" is coming soon, according to the first trailer released on Wednesday.

The news, broken by the production's official social media account, soon made headlines, with a hashtag on China's Twitter-like Weibo generating 210 million reads in less than six hours.

Known as "Three-Body," the upcoming series is on the list of dramas to be released or pursued in 2022, major Chinese online streaming platform Tencent Video announced on Wednesday, without providing a specific release date.

The series stars Zhang Luyi and Yu Hewei, and is directed by Yang Lei.

"The Three-Body Problem" is the first book in a sci-fi trilogy that revolves around physicist Ye Wenjie's contact with the Trisolaran civilization living in a three-sun system, and follows the centuries-long clashes between earthlings and the aliens.

Movie and series adaptations of the critically acclaimed trilogy have been greatly anticipated by Chinese sci-fi fans, and any relevant news is highly popular within China's online community.

"The Wandering Earth," another sci-fi novel by Liu Cixin, became a blockbuster film in 2019 and raked in a Chinese box office total of 4.68 billion yuan (around $730 million).