Title Ball Lightning Series --- Author Cixin Liu Cover Art Stephan Martiniere Publisher Tor Books - 2018 First Printing 2015 Category Hard SF Warnings None Main Characters Chen, Zhang Bin, Lin Yun. Ding Yi Main Elements Technology

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.

I was looking forward to reading this book, eager to see what the SF from halfway around the world might be like, and for the most part I enjoyed it very much. Here we have Chen, whose parents were incinerated by ball lightning while their son watched. This set him on a path of obsession, to find out everything about the phenomena that so nonchalantly killed his parents.

Along the way he encounters others as damaged as himself, and in the end, I think the was more a story about these broken characters than it was about the ball lightning, about how a fixation can consume one's life, and the consequences on others, particularly when that obsession, such as Lin Yun's, is on developing new and better weapons at any cost, even if you have to destroy yourself to destroy the enemy.

I'd never put much thought to ball lightning before, though I'd heard of the phenomena. Reading about it I found it hard to believe it had the characteristic the author attributed to it, though I also couldn't see why he'd make stuff up on the science end of things. A quick scan through some youtube videos confirmed it pretty much is as weird as described (though I still wonder if it could fry every second page in a notebook?). I also enjoyed pondering the theory the author put forth as to what ball lightning really is, though he admits he picked the most unlikely one (but also the one with more interesting consequences for his story), if you take that theory as a fact, it leads to some really mindblowing consequences that were fun to explore. After all, SF is nothing if not the exploration of a "what-if", and with ball lightning being so weird, it's hard to find a theory that actually reasonably covers it's behaviours, and this one did convincingly enough.

It was also very interesting to see the world from the other side. See, in so many book targeted towards Europe or North America, the bad guys are either Russians or more recently, Chinese. Now we see it from the other side. Though never explicitly named, they clearly go to war with the Americans (there was some debate in a book club I'm in as to whether the translation was "sugar coated" to be more palatable for American audiences, they don't really want to see themselves as the bad guys, I hope that's not the case, after all the Americans/Europeans certainly don't tone it down the other way around, just look at James Bond). In the end, the war was, to me anyway, just a plot device for the characters to be able to test out their weapons, since it barely touched the characters otherwise, just this thing going on in the background. And then when you tell a tale from the point of view of true scientists, in the end they weren't enemies at all. Its just other people can't resist taking inventions intended to help people and using them to kill them instead. And the the really pure scientist, that don't care about the impact on society either way, only caring that they learn more about whatever they are studying.

If nothing else, this book sparked an interest in me to learn more about ball lightning, hopefully there's a youtube video out there of it passing through someone's house, that is just the eeriest idea ever, and probably explains a good percentage of both paranormal and alien enounters humans have had through the centuries! After all, perhaps the strangest thing is that this is not a rare phenomena and yet science barely admitted to it's existence until relatively recently.