Ball Lightning
On Chen's fourteenth birthday a glowing sphere of ball lightning drifts through the dining room, vaporizes his parents into ash, and leaves the rest of the house untouched. Liu Cixin's standalone novel, written before his Three-Body trilogy and set in the same wider universe, follows Chen's lifelong obsession with that impossible event, from atmospheric physics labs to top-secret Chinese weapons programs trying to weaponize the phenomenon. The hunt for an explanation pulls in a brilliant Russian researcher, a major in the People's Liberation Army, and finally a quantum mechanical answer that bends reality in ways the characters spend the rest of the book absorbing. Cool, methodical, and unmistakably Cixin, the book is a meditation on scientific obsession dressed as a war story.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Ball Lightning
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
After ball lightning kills both his parents on his fourteenth birthday, a Chinese physicist devotes his life to understanding it. The deeper he goes, the stranger and more weaponizable the answers become.
Ball Lightning was written by Liu Cixin, the Chinese author of The Three-Body Problem. It was originally published in Chinese in 2004 and translated into English by Joel Martinsen in 2018. It is a standalone with thematic ties to the Three-Body trilogy.
Loosely. Ball Lightning shares some scientific concepts and was Liu Cixin's earlier exploration of ideas that later appear in The Three-Body Problem. A character from Ball Lightning has a brief connection to the Three-Body trilogy.
Ball Lightning is 205 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Ball Lightning takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Ball Lightning is a standalone novel by Herbert Boerner, not part of a series.
Ball Lightning is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.