Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu, Joel Martinsen (Translator)

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Three-Body Trilogy, Cixin Liu's Ball Lightning is the story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against the drive to harness new discoveries with no consideration of their possible consequences.

When Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of this mysterious natural phenomenon. 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. While Chen’s quest for answers gives purpose to his lonely life, it also pits him against soldiers and scientists with 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.

"Wildly imaginative."—Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogy

Tor books by Cixin Liu

The Three-Body Problem Series

#1 The Three-Body Problem

#2 The Dark Forest

#3 Death's End

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765394095
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

CIXIN LIU is the most prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People’s Republic of China. Liu is a winner of the Hugo Award, an eight-time winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked as an engineer in a power plant. His novels include The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End.

Joel Martinsen is research director for a media intelligence company. His translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Chutzpah!, and Pathlight. He lives in Beijing.

Editorial Reviews

"Wildly imaginative, really interesting." -President Barack Obama on the Three-Body Problem trilogy

“A breakthrough book . . . a unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology.” —George R. R. Martin, on The Three Body Problem

“Extraordinary.” —The New Yorker, on The Three Body Problem

“Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review, on The Three Body Problem

"A must-read in any language.” —Booklist, on The Three Body Problem

"A meditation on technology, progress, morality, extinction, and knowledge that doubles as a cosmos-in-the-balance thriller.... a testament to just how far [Liu's] own towering imagination has taken him: Far beyond the borders of his country, and forever into the canon of science fiction. - NPR, on Death's End

"The best kind of science fiction, familiar but strange all at the same time." — Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Three Body Problem

From the Publisher

Using a half dozen accents, narrator Feodor Chin brings his video and computer game voice-over experience to the fore. Hugo Award-winning novelist Cixin Liu’s military science fiction explores what might happen if the rare natural phenomenon of ball lightning were harnessed. Could it be used as a potent energy source or possibly as an unstoppable superweapon? The novel is part magical realism, part rumination on particle physics. Chin keeps the characters sounding vulnerable as two Chinese scientists grapple with their pasts and their ethics while madly working to create a new bomb that could destroy the world. This solid speculative fiction makes for good listening. B.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2018 - AudioFile

2018-05-28
A new science-fiction venture from the award-winning Chinese author of the brilliant alien-contact trilogy concluded with Death's End (2016), whose readers, hopefully, learned to expect the unexpected.As a boy, Chen—we're offered no other name—watches in helpless horror as ball lightning engendered by a powerful electrical storm incinerates his parents. He dedicates his career to studying this baffling but well-attested natural phenomenon. His investigations take him to a remote mountaintop where he encounters Lin Yun, a young and extremely attractive army major obsessed with weaponizing such forces of nature as lightning. Encouraged by Lin's enthusiasm and single-mindedness after years of futile theoretical modeling and pursuing dead ends, Chen glimpses the beginnings of a breakthrough, while his compulsive need for answers helps him suppress doubts about Lin's ultimate goals. But neither Lin nor her superiors suffer from any such inhibitions, and they bring in Ding Yi, a brilliant physicist utterly indifferent to any real-world consequences his discoveries and conclusions might have. Fascinating conundrums and intriguing extrapolations abound—Liu demands a basic scientific literacy of his readers—but the story lacks the visceral tension, generated by the existential threat of hostile aliens, that gave the previous trilogy its edgy brilliance. What's of greater import here is the way Liu's approach differs from what we might expect. When, for instance, philosophical considerations arise, Liu tackles them head-on, as few English-language writers care to do. We might expect such a complementary pair of protagonists to become romantically involved—but no. When Liu writes of war breaking out, we would certainly ask why and against whom: questions that hold no interest for Liu, who declines to enlighten us. And what other writer would select a first-person narrator who later proceeds to write himself almost completely out of the narrative?Consistently surprising and absorbing—just not for the usual reasons.

Kirkus Reviews