So settle in and try a science fiction story from another place that will draw you in and make it home for you while you read.

But lighting is still one of the genuinely tremendous sources of power and destruction.

The pulp days had plenty of lightning generators and weapons, but they fell by the wayside in pursuit of more complicated energy sources. Ball Lightning would probably be classified as hard science fiction due to an emphasis on the science parts of the book, but Cixin does an excellent job with the interactions of his characters and their motivations.īall Lightning is not the expansive story that the Three-Body Problem was, but it is a well-written, self-contained book about something rarely discussed in modern science fiction. This obsession leads him to be part of a civilian and military team trying to harness the power of lightning both as a power source and as a weapon. Cixin Liu is the author of your next favourite sci-fi novel WIRED On his fourteenth birthday, right before his eyes, Chens parents are incinerated by a. Chen is a college student of atmospheric science, obsessed with ball lightning after having watched his parents killed by it as a child. It was first published in English in 2018, with a translation by Joel Martensen of. It gained awards, best-seller status, and even a Presidential shout-out from Barack Obama.īall Lightning was written before the Three-Body Problem and shows that he has been writing interesting science fiction for a while. Ball Lightning is a 2004 Chinese science-fiction novel by Liu Cixin (best known for The Three-Body Problem ), possibly the single most popular sci-fi novel in China. Cixin Lui is the author of the Three-Body Problem trilogy lauded by many as one of the excellent science fiction books to be written by a Chinese author and translated into English.

Ball lightning cixin liu review