Ball Lightning is another science fiction novel by Chinese author Cixin Liu whose excellent Three-Body trilogy (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End) won the Hugo award for Best Novel in 2015. Liu is the first Chinese-language science fiction author to win the Hugo award and thus I was quite excited about reading Ball Lightning which was actually written before the Three-Body trilogy (which is officially known as Remembrance of Earth's Past) but has been translated and released in the United States well afterwards.
One of the features of Liu’s science fiction is his inclusion of real science and mathematical concepts along with his whimsical adaptation of these ideas in creative and mind-expanding ways. This is a central feature of Ball Lightning which is about a form of spherical lightning that kills the parents of Chen, the main character, in the first chapter and ignites a lifelong obsession with the topic.
In Ball Lightning, Liu again impresses with his imaginative use of science in the service of plot, perhaps at the expense of characterization. Chen is almost a cipher. The much more interesting characters in the book are Lin Yun, a female Army captain who is obsessed with finding and using scientific discoveries to produce paradigm-shifting weapons to benefit the Chinese nation, and Ding Yi, a brilliant but eccentric male scientist who makes mind-bending discoveries about the nature of the Universe.
Unfortunately Ball Lightning is not as effective or fascinating as the books in Remembrance of Earth's Past. I think some aspect of that may be due to the nature of the translation. Some of the language in this book seems somewhat stilted, in a way that reduces the impact of the many creative ideas Liu deploys. Another aspect of the book which contributes to my dissatisfaction is my lack of connection with the characters. As I said before, Chen has almost no personality. Both Lin Yun and Ding Yi have almost too much but none of the characters can be said to be appealing. This is not unusual in a Cixin Liu novel, but usually the creativity of the ideas and elegance of the plot counteracts this aspect of his writing (or at least it did in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).
Overall, I would say that Ball Lightning is a solid 3.5 stars, because it fails to meet the sky-high expectations set by the brilliance of the other work I have read by this author, but that still means it is well above the median of most work published in the genre of hard science fiction.
One of the features of Liu’s science fiction is his inclusion of real science and mathematical concepts along with his whimsical adaptation of these ideas in creative and mind-expanding ways. This is a central feature of Ball Lightning which is about a form of spherical lightning that kills the parents of Chen, the main character, in the first chapter and ignites a lifelong obsession with the topic.
In Ball Lightning, Liu again impresses with his imaginative use of science in the service of plot, perhaps at the expense of characterization. Chen is almost a cipher. The much more interesting characters in the book are Lin Yun, a female Army captain who is obsessed with finding and using scientific discoveries to produce paradigm-shifting weapons to benefit the Chinese nation, and Ding Yi, a brilliant but eccentric male scientist who makes mind-bending discoveries about the nature of the Universe.
Unfortunately Ball Lightning is not as effective or fascinating as the books in Remembrance of Earth's Past. I think some aspect of that may be due to the nature of the translation. Some of the language in this book seems somewhat stilted, in a way that reduces the impact of the many creative ideas Liu deploys. Another aspect of the book which contributes to my dissatisfaction is my lack of connection with the characters. As I said before, Chen has almost no personality. Both Lin Yun and Ding Yi have almost too much but none of the characters can be said to be appealing. This is not unusual in a Cixin Liu novel, but usually the creativity of the ideas and elegance of the plot counteracts this aspect of his writing (or at least it did in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).
Overall, I would say that Ball Lightning is a solid 3.5 stars, because it fails to meet the sky-high expectations set by the brilliance of the other work I have read by this author, but that still means it is well above the median of most work published in the genre of hard science fiction.
Title: Ball Lightning.
Author: Ann Leckie.
Paperback: 384 pages.
Publisher: Tor.
Date Published: August 4, 2018.
Date Read: December 8, 2018.
GOODREADS RATING: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5.0).
OVERALL GRADE: B+ (3.33/4.0).
PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: B.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: B+.