A new standalone military SF adventure from the bestselling and award-winning author of The Three-Body Problem.
When Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of mysterious natural phenomena. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier in particle physics. Although Chen’s quest provides a purpose for his lonely life, his reasons for chasing his elusive quarry come into conflict with soldiers and scientists who have motives of their own: a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge.
Ball Lightning, by award-winning Chinese science fiction author Cixin …
A new standalone military SF adventure from the bestselling and award-winning author of The Three-Body Problem.
When Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of mysterious natural phenomena. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier in particle physics. Although Chen’s quest provides a purpose for his lonely life, his reasons for chasing his elusive quarry come into conflict with soldiers and scientists who have motives of their own: a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge.
Ball Lightning, by award-winning Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu, is a fast-paced story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against a push to harness new discoveries with no consideration of their possible consequences.
The original Chinese version was published in 2004. In 2018 the English version, translated by Joel Martinsen, was published in the US by Tor Books.
Although this is a prequel to "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy it is written in a different style - putting it more in a traditional Chinese military sci-fi genre. I enjoyed the story but military sci-fi is not really my taste, and I found my suspension of disbelief breaking down on some of the quantum aspects of the plot... but given real quantum effects are hard to believe anyway perhaps that shouldn't be a criticism.
Staggering premise and concepts; however, as this was my first Liu Cixin read I don’t know if it was the original storytelling or the translation that was off for me. After reading the afterword, I am glad I read this prior to starting The Three-Body Problem.
