'Consistently surprising and absorbing --just not for the usual reasons.'

 —Kirkus Reviews

'This novel rewards commitment. Eventually…Liu's own boundless creativity finds its footing.'

 — NPR

‘Ball Lightning is powerful, imaginative fiction, a remarkable excise in scientific exploration and the pursuit of knowledge.’

 —SFBook Reviews

Editor's Note

This work, written before The Three-Body Problem, is the result of the significant effort and extraordinary talent of Liu Cixin. The book combines science, fantasy and suspense. People have always been fascinated by natural phenomena such as ball lightning, and many readers are swept away by the science, and yet the author provides suspense and surprises throughout the book so all readers are able to enjoy the book. Readers hunt for answers to mystifying riddles in the book, simultaneously worrying for the key characters of the novel. Time and time again, the constantly changing situations of the main characters and the twists in the story create cliffhangers that make it hard for readers to put the book down.

Like The Three-Body Problem, Ball Lightning is wildly imaginative and filled with the mysteries of quantum mechanics. If The Three-Body Problem gave you a new appreciation for the vastness of space, then Ball Lightning will make you think that the flowers and trees around you are just as intriguing as nebulae.

Synopsis

On a stormy night, ball lightning appears in a young person’s field of vision. The moment that the ball lightning struck on the night of his fourteenth birthday, his parents were turned to dust. His life changed completely on that night, and he decided to devote himself to cracking the secret of phenomenon that turned him into an orphan. The young person grew up and became Dr. Chen, a meteorologist. Once he meets a scientist named Lin Yun. She is obsessed with weapons, is fiercely loyal to the People’s Liberation Army and has an interesting background. With Lin’s help, he generates ball lightning and they begin doing tests. Lin gets the ball lightning weapon she was hoping for, and Chen achieves success by developing the macro-electron theory.

Soon thereafter, war erupts between China and America and the disaster prevention and reduction system developed on the basis of Chen’s research is exploited, destroying China’s fleet of aircraft carriers. Lin’s boyfriend, the captain of an aircraft carrier, is lost in the war. Lin pushes her team to work on a macro-fusion system based on ball lightning theory. In the process, she enters the quantum state. When the macro-fusion system explodes, a cold “blue sun” rises in western China, over the Gobi Desert. The Gobi is engulfed in blue light and the world becomes strange and totally unfamiliar. The threat of macro-fusion causes the war to end and Chen’s life finally goes back to normal. Then one day he finds a quantum rose in his home…

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