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Posted in: Books, Netflix, Pop Culture, TV | Tagged: 3 Body Problem, dune, frank herbert, Liu Cixin, netflix, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
3 Body Problem Books and Silent Spring Sell Out Thanks to Netflix
Netflix's series adaptation 3 Body Problem has boosted sales in a big way for Liu Cixin's books and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
Article Summary
- Netflix's 3 Body Problem series spurs sellout of Liu Cixin’s trilogy books.
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson sees sales leap after Netflix adaptation.
- Both 3 Body Problem and Dune have roots in environmental themes.
- TV adaptations have historically boosted book sales across genres.
The books of the 3 Body Problem – all three in the trilogy – have sold out, and Silent Spring, a book heavily referenced in the Netflix TV adaptation, has seen sales increase after the premiere of the Netflix TV adaptation of 3 Body Problem. I had a feeling this would happen. If you look up Amazon, every print edition of The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End by Liu Cixin is sold out. This is the hardcovers, the paperbacks, the paperback boxset, the UK editions, the UK paperback boxset, and the UK omnibus editions. The Chinese versions are available, though. The paperback edition of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson has shot up to No. 1 in the Environmental Section. This is the book that Yie Wenjie (Zine Tseng) secretly reads during the Cultural Revolution and is influenced by. She gets prosecuted and nearly killed because the book, being foreign and in English, was considered a piece of foreign propaganda. In real life, Silent Spring is the book that inspired the environmentalist movements as we know them today. It might be the most influential book published after the Second World War. You should read it if you haven't.
3 Body Problem and Dune Both Share Silent Spring
Silent Spring is also believed to have influenced another major Science Fiction novel. Frank Herbert began to serialized Dune in 1963, a year after the publication of Silent Spring. His writings about the environment and the ruined desert lands of the planet Arrakis are reminiscent of Rachel Carson's writings about the gradual ruination of the environment. 3 Body Problem and Dune share not only that pedigree, but both sagas are also notoriously dense, multilayered, and therefore extremely difficult to adapt to film and television, yet we got good adaptations of both in 2023 and 2024.
Books Get the TV Boost
3 Body Problem is only the latest instance of a book's sales being boosted by a popular, buzzed-over TV series. The same has happened to the Reacher novels, the Lord of the Rings books, and the Shadow and Bone books when they got adaptations on the streamers. I wonder if the other books that appeared in 3 Body Problem might get a sales boost – Fermi's Paradox: Cosmology and Life by Michael Bodin and Game Theory: A Simple Introduction by K.H. Erickson. These titles were selected by Yie Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) for Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) to read when she picked him to be the one to save humanity. They will be used to lead to the founding of Cosmic Sociology as a field that Saul will use to finally find a strategy against the aliens. This last bit is speculation more than a spoiler, but the showrunners didn't pick them by accident. They knew what they were doing.
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