Our Discussion of Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu

Ball Lightning by Liu Cixin and Joel Martinsen (Translation)

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. Goodreads

Below are a sampling of our comments:

• I liked it – I grew up with a mechanical engineer and am used to hearing about industrial problems
• The dialog was very stilted. Was it the translation, cultural differences, or something else?
• It was dry and I didn’t care about the characters – they weren’t well-developed
• The characters were secondary to the story
• There was no heart in this book – the plot was interesting, but I didn’t care about the characters
• Lin Yun was a sociopath
• Each character had one terrible event that happened in the past that influenced everything that happened later
• It was hard to keep track of the characters – they were introduced with titles like "Colonel” and only given names later on
• It was clever when Chen had his aha moment at the lighthouse
• Ball lightening didn’t work as a weapon – only the weaponized bees were successful
• The concept of mega electrons and atoms was interesting, but the book was dry
• The author did wax poetic from time to time about nature and there were a few really good sentences
• In the audiobook, the character of Ding Yi sounded like Clint Eastwood

Please add any additional thoughts or comments you have about Ball Lightning. We gave this title the codes HDS, MIL, ALT, POL, & CUL with an average rating of 3.