Xu Yao, who worked on the Netflix adaptation, poisoned his colleague Lin Qi over a business dispute.

The release of Netflix’s series 3 Body Problem has been watched millions of times around the globe since its release late last month.

It has even found an audience in China where Netflix is unavailable, sparking much chatter among viewers of the series.

But many fans of the three-book series, credited with propelling China’s nascent science fiction genre after its publication in 2008, have also been paying attention to a court room in Shanghai where one of the key players behind the adaptation was sentenced to death just a day after the show’s release.

His crime? Murdering a man sometimes dubbed China’s “billionaire millennial” - the gaming tycoon Lin Qi, whose company Yoozoo Games owns the rights for film adaptations of the Chinese science fiction epic.