3 Body Problem has been a ratings hit for Netflix—according to the streamer, it racked up 11 million views in its first four days—and fans are waiting to hear if all those tantalizing questions it left unanswered will be addressed in a second season. But even with all its twists and that one really brutal sequence, there’s a behind-the-scenes drama as shocking as anything contained within the series.
As reported in the New York Times, the saga has more than enough elements to fill a Netflix true-crime documentary series. In 2020, Lin Qi—the 39-year-old billionaire behind gaming company Yoozoo who’d optioned the film rights to Liu Cixin’s acclaimed The Three-Body Problem—was murdered by a former executive at his company, Xu Yao. Xu was recently sentenced to death by a court in Shanghai for the crime. The paper quotes a Chinese news outlet as calling the case “as bizarre as a Hollywood blockbuster,” and notes that while certain details haven’t been made public, this “tale of deadly corporate ambition and rivalry with a macabre edge” saw Xu—a lawyer who’d been at Yoozoo since 2017 and worked in the division specifically overseeing the Three-Body Problem rights—become enraged at work after a demotion.
That’s why he turned to the dark web and set up a lab (drawing inspiration, apparently, from a favorite TV show: Breaking Bad), testing poisons on dogs, cats, and
Courtney Milan writes books about carriages, corsets, and smartwatches. Her books have received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist. She is a New York Times and a USA Today Bestseller.
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Before she started writing romance, Courtney got a graduate degree in theoretical physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. After that, just to shake things up, she went to law school at the University of Michigan and graduated summa cum laude. Then she did a handful of clerkships. She was a law professor for a while. She now writes full-time.
Courtney is represented by Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency.