I recently finished watching the animated series Pantheon on Netflix, so I decided to read the Ken Liu short stories it was adapted from, six of which are in Liu's collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, with the earliest story in that continuity, "Carthaginian Rose," being in an anthology called Empire of Dreams and Mirages. The series is mainly based on the 3-part series consisting of "The Gods Will Not Be Chained," "The Gods Will Not Be Slain," and "The Gods Have Not Died In Vain," while the final episode draws on elements of the story "Seven Birthdays." The show has little in common with the other three stories, "Carthaginian Rose," "Staying Behind," and "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer," aside from the general concept and setting and a couple of details. They're all short stories or novelettes, so I was able to read all seven in two sittings this afternoon and early evening.
What surprised me was how much of the show was not from the stories. The first episode is largely a very faithful adaptation of the early scenes of "Not Be Chained," and the overall story provides the arc of much of the first season, but it's mainly focused on the character of Maddie and her family (who were named Wynn in the stories, rather than Kim as in the show), with passing mention of the characters Laurie Lowell and Chanda (whose first name is Nils rather than Vinod and is a rather different character). The plot diverges heavily as the series goes on, with the main commonality with the latter two "Gods" stories being the character of Mist. Startlingly, everything in the show involving Caspian, his family, Stephen Holstrom, and Julius Pope is completely original. I'd expected to find out that maybe they were from a different set of stories and Craig Silverstein combined them into one narrative, but no, they're all-new. None of the characters outside the "Gods" trilogy are incorporated into the show, although the actions of the protagonist in "Seven Birthdays" are performed by Maddie in the show.
All in all, I think the TV series is probably an improvement on the stories. It incorporates many of the same ideas and character threads, but adds a lot of new, rich storylines and SF concepts that feel mostly as smart and plausible as the ones in Liu's stories. Although there's one element in the stories that I found very implausible. They posit that uploading human minds into digital existence uses far less resources than living, embodied humans, so that humanity giving up bodily existence to live as software in data centers would allow the environment to heal. But we've seen in recent years that large data centers consume massive amounts of power and are terrible for the environment. (Also, who repairs and maintains them and their power plants if all humans become virtual? Well, robots, I guess.)
