Ball Lightning
2004 • 352 pages
Ratings21
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings21
Average rating3.5
On his fourteenth birthday, right before his eyes, Chen's parents are incinerated by a blast of ball lightning. Striving to make sense of this bizarre tragedy, he dedicates his life to a single goal: to unlock the secrets of this enigmatic natural phenomenon. His pursuit of ball lightning will take him far from home, across mountain peaks chasing storms and deep into highly classified subterranean laboratories as he slowly unveils a new frontier in particle physics.Chen's obsession gives purpose to his lonely life, but it can't insulate him from the real world's interest in his discoveries. He will be pitted against scientists, soldiers and governments with motives of their own: a physicist who has no place for moral judgement in his pursuit of knowledge; a beautiful army major obsessed with new ways to wage war; a desperate nation facing certain military defeat.Conjuring awe-inspiring new worlds of cosmology and philosophy from meticulous scientific speculation, Ball Lightning has all the scope and imagination that so enthralled readers of Cixin Liu's award-winning Three-Body trilogy.
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I picked up this book because I want to read the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and I was told Ball Lightning was a sort of prequel. I don't know if it's true, but this book wasn't that amusing. The pace was slow, more hardcore sci-fi than I expected, and I turned out to be really interesting in the last chapters. I have mixed feelings for some characters (especially Lin Yun), but I wasn't impressed by the others either. I don't think character development was important in this book, so maybe that's the reason why I don't feel compelled for any of them. All in all, it was a decent read, and I'm definitely reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy because it seems to be way better than this book.
I loved the three body problem trilogy but ball lightning was no where near those levels. The first 2/3s of the book were alright but after a character comes back and starts telling their 20 page long life story it got very long in the tooth. The bit at the very end got me interested but all in all I can't say this lives up to three body.
Still worth a read but skim the parts you don't like.
