Translated by Joel Martinsen.
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 phenomenon. 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.
Cixin Liu
Liu Cixin (born 1963) is a best-selling and award-winning science fiction writer based in the People's Republic of China. Liu is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award (China's most prestigious literary science fiction award) and a winner of the Nebula Award. Liu's work is considered hard science fiction.
Liu received technical training from North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power. He has worked as a computer engineer for a power plant located in a remote village in Shanxi province.
Liu's most famous work, The Three-Body Problem, was published in 2007. It was translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books in November 2014, and won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel. He was the first Asian writer to win "Best Novel".
