Ball Lightning

It's hard not to compare Cixin Liu's Ball Lightning to his incredible Three-Body Problem series, and I'll be the first to admit that doing so doesn't do Ball Lightning many favors. The Three-Body Problem is something staggering, taking a slew of complex concepts and pulling them together into an exploration of life across the universe, the nature of existence, and so much more. Ball Lightning is a much smaller work, and as Liu concedes in his afterword, it's much more of a Chinese work of science-fiction - it's focused very much on Chinese breakthroughs and explorations of science, rather than something larger. And yet, that doesn't really detract from some of the mind-bending ideas at play here, or just how ambitiously odd Ball Lightning can be, once you can get it out of the shadow of Liu's masterpiece.Ball Lightning, as the title suggests, orbits around a study of the bizarre phenomenon of ball lightning, which affects the life of our protagonist at an early age. And over the course of a life dedicated to its study, he finds himself involved in military applications of his science, questions about the nature of the universe, and much more. At its best moments, Ball Lightning really grapples with the questions raised by science - what responsibility do scientists have when their work is used to hurt and kill other human beings? Can the quest for knowledge be separated from its uses? Those are thorny questions, and Liu doesn't have easy answers to them - something which gives the book a moral depth that resonated with me.Other aspects of Ball Lightning aren't quite as strong, though. The character who comes to most represent the weaponization of science ends up feeling like a one-note characterization, which is more disappointing since she's one of the book's only female characters. Meanwhile, while Liu's ideas about ball lightning are original and truly imaginative, they never feel like they're explored in as much depth as you'd wish - there are implications there that could drive a whole trilogy, once again. Even so, Ball Lightning is well worth a read; its ideas are compelling, its exploration of science comes from a place of love but also a place of complex ideas, and its imagination is boundless. Just try to set aside expectations that might be set by one of the great works of science fiction.

Overall the plot is an interesting and cohesive near-future speculation. Unfortunately the work struggles to develop events, leaving a superficiality to them, and the character dialogue is stilted, awkward and melodramatic. The psychiatry of a strong woman with a weak and simplistic motivation was unfortunate. The work lacks a vitality for the most part, except for the intense Macro-fusion chapter, the conclusion, and scattered gems of bright and brilliant ideas in the mess of chapters.The through point of the ball lightning research and application is the most compelling part of the book, but the author ignores a workaround to one of the limitations he sets up for the story's sake (a workaround the author himself mentions earlier).Published the year before the first book of the trilogy masterpiece Remembrance of Earth's Past, this gives glimpses of what the author would do, but it does not approach those heights

The book flap and reviews of "Ball Lightning" reveal little about the story or plot, so I thought I'd talk a little about that without giving too much of the game away. It should be noted that the author (who claims to have personally experienced ball lightning) discusses the book's genesis in the afterword, which was originally released in China prior to the Three Body Problem at the publisher's behest. TBP name-checks ball lightning once or twice along with physicist Ding Yi, but mainly as teaser references the way Michael Moorcock might. The story feels familiar though as renegade scientists, quantum physics, military concerns and heroines figure prominently and there's even a hint of aliens (Trisolarans?) watching us from afar.In a nutshell, the story revolves around an atmospheric scientist who lost his parents to ball lightning getting sucked into a military attempt to weaponize the phenomena. The cast of characters expands to include others with deep personal connections to tragedies involving ball lightning or advanced weaponry in general, with Cold War-era research that goes nowhere until renegade physicist Ding Yi solves the puzzle and progress - involving some truly crazy quantum extrapolations - begins apace. Experimental weapons obsessive Lin Yun serves as the heroine driven by personal demons to exploit Ball Lightning (which turns out to have unusually broad and magical applications) in its war against the United States and perhaps indirectly, avenge her mother's death."Ball Lightning" is a smoother read than the "Three Body Problem" was; the relationships are better developed, the storytelling less forced, and the political Great Leap Forward tropes that weighed down TBP are nowhere to be found. The future science though is not up to the same level that TBP was, making suspension of disbelief a bit harder the second time around but you won't regret it, because... well, it's got a bit of a Hollywood ending. In fact, the whole book has a bit of a Hero's Journey feel to it, possibly written with film in mind. A great beach read!

If you liked the three body problem, then you may be a bit underwhelmed by Ball Lightning. In the Three-Body trilogy the quantity and scope of real scientific principles taken to the extremes of science fiction were, to me, quite staggering. In Ball Lightning Cixin posits an interesting and unexpected fictional theory for what ball lightning is, but beyond that single revelation the book's scientific scope and wow-factor is relatively limited. And if you know anything about certain principles of quantum physics, even accounting for its bizarre nature, some of the effects described in the book quite frankly got a bit too implausible for me. I felt the laws of science were bent a bit too much in order to emphasise the underpinning human story.This is more of a book about why one of the characters is the way they are rather than being the wild and surprising science fiction adventure which I would have preferred. This was a problem because the impact of this book's description of personal relationships and the emotions surrounding them were somewhat lost on me - whether that's because its written from a Chinese cultural perspective which is so very different from a Western reader's point of view, or whether because something was literally lost in translation, I'm not so sure.A lot of the larger scene setting was also strangely vague. For example, the book deals with weaponising Ball Lightning and eventually war breaks out. What war this is, who the enemy might be and what it might be about are never mentioned. You'd probably assume that it's the USA but it’s never actually confirmed; perhaps from a Chinese perspective that would be more apparent?With the three body problem, especially the third book Death's End, I was blown away. With Ball Lightning it wasn't a chore to read through to the end, but I wasn't disappointed it had finished either.

I came to this book after reading both Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy and the Wandering Earth book of short stories, the first of which is remarkable in its scope, and the latter hugely inventive. Compared to these, Ball Lightning is a great disappointment.It is not just the poor characterisation, the casual sexism (“her cool rationality was something I’d never seen in other women”), the questionable science, the teenage boy-like obsession with weapons, or, for Kindle readers, the formatting which has left hundreds of dashes dotted throughout the book. All these things would be forgivable, just about, if there was something worth looking past its faults for.But there isn’t. Because, worst of all, it is just dull.I like to think I have a relatively high threshold for boredom when reading. But Ball Lightning is beyond dull, consisting for the most part of endless descriptions of research into ball lightning. And even this might be acceptable if it were endless descriptions of actual real-world research, from which one might learn something. But as far as I am aware, it is not.In the afterward, Cixin Liu describes the novel as being the tradition of 20th century Chinese sci-fi. If this is the case, I’m relieved that 20th century Chinese sci-fi it has, for the most part, remained in China.And, just to make matters worse, the translation is by Joel Martinsen, who - in my opinion - also let down the author with his work on the second volume of the Three-Body trilogy. Unless Cixin Liu really does write in the style of an American high-schooler.Perhaps part of the issue is that I came to the book with such high expectations. An average novel from a potentially great author somehow seems worse than an average novel from an average author. But only part of the issue. And for anyone wanting to see what Cixin Liu is capable of, as many other reviewers have suggested, avoid this book and try either his Three Body Problem for hard sci-fi, or Wandering Earth for sheer inventiveness.

I’m a huge fan of the three-body problem trilogy, so much that I rank it #1 in my sci-fi reading to date. I have eagerly waited for the author’s next book. But I’m utterly disappiontd that this book, Ball Lightning, is built arond a very poor selection of topic. The subject is simply not interesting. I have done my utmost to stay with it but 20% into the book and the story still does not move an inch from totally boring. Very disappointed and I’m dropping it.

I read the 3 Body Problem (all 3) with great interest and enjoyment despite the author's tendency to explore technical issues a bit too labouriously.Ball Lighting is far too obsessive on this one subject and as a result rather narrow in scope and fictional complexity.I have read about 30% and probably won't complete the book.

I enjoyed the book immensely. Having one experience of actual ball lightning enhanced my interest and its development as a military weapon seemed to be in accordance with current scientific theory. A word of warning: you need a more than basic understanding of physics to understand the plot. There's virtually no human interest and the text is that of a resume of scientific research. But if you read it as a science tract, its really exciting.