Plus, the fact that Ball Lightning is translated by Joel Martinsen, the same translator of The Dark Forest, made me eager to read this one. The second book in that series, The Dark Forest remains in my personal top three sci-fi novels of all time and will most likely stay there for a very long time. I’m a fan of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth Past trilogy. In 2018 the English version, translated by Joel Martinsen, was published in the US by Tor Books.Ĭixin Liu greatly examined the effects of obsession, science, and weaponry in Ball Lightning. The original Chinese version was published in 2004. 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.īall 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 more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier in particle physics. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. 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.

A new standalone military SF adventure from the bestselling and award-winning author of The Three-Body Problem.

Ball lightning book