Book Review: Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu

Chinese author Cixin Liu wrote a trilogy of science fiction novels called, Remembrance of Earth's Past. The trilogy showed up on Barrack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg's list of worthwhile books, and it is also hands down my favorite science fiction story of all time.

Cixin Liu's trilogy is a cerebral, scientific mystery, and it covered a lot of scientific and philosophical grounds. In 2018, a prequel to the trilogy, titled, Ball Lightning, was translated and made available to the English speaking world. Ball Lightning is a stand-alone story, but this time around Cixin Liu explored a different set of questions; the questions about the values of pure theoretical versus practical research, and more importantly, the ethical question - should scientific research advance at the cost of everything else?

The book is an atmospheric mystery, based on a real but unexplained phenomenon called ball lightning. This phenomenon is usually associated with thunderstorms and it is potentially dangerous.

The story began when a teenage boy, Chen, witnessed a horrific incident, where ball lightning reduced his parents to ashes. The accident took place at Chen's 14^th birthday party,  and it deeply affected Chen. He developed an obsession with the phenomenon, dedicating his life and career researching these curious balls of electricity. Early in Chen's career, his ball lightning research was going no where, mostly because it was expensive and often deemed impractical. However, later on Chen met an young army major, Lin Yun, who was toying with the idea of weaponizing ball lightning. Chen and Lin, an inquisitive scientist and a goal-drive army officer, teamed up to solve the mystery of ball lightning, with the end goal of turning it into a weapon. But the duo's differing natures soon caused tensions in their partnerships, but they made progress nevertheless, especially with an international war breeding in the background.

To write this book review I did some additional readings about ball lightning. It turned out, in comparison to the 1960s, today ball lightning is a widely accepted phenomenon by the scientific community even though it remains unexplained. There is even a photo from 2014, showing the light spectrum of ball lightning, captured by a high speed camera in Lanzhou. I thought it was astounding a mystery which was almost deemed paranormal half a century ago is now a confirmed phenomenon and under investigation in the scientific field; it reminds me of a quote from Arthur C. Clarke - "Magic is just science that we don't understand yet".

Ball Lightning is a prequel to Liu's beloved trilogy. While the trilogy was ambitious and the scope was immense, encompassing the past, the present, and the future, Ball Lightning is set in the present day only and it iis much smaller in scope. However, this book is as suspenseful and brilliant as ever. The most dramatic moments in the book are all about scientific discoveries, but Cixin Liu still build tension and instilled suspense into these moments, because the story has a philosophical backdrop, one that centred on the reckless pursuit of knowledge, and how these characters' indifference to real life consequences which ultimately lead to something that threatened to destroy the world.

The story in Liu's novel is about solving the riddle of ball lightning, and the phenomenon itself is also the story's antagonist. This is a very interesting choice for the plotting, considering it is rare to find a science fiction story where the climax is about a discovery of science itself. Furthermore, I also appreciated Cixin Liu's prospective manner in exploring the interface between science and philosophy, it offers the western readers a different angle to examine these topics and it is refreshing.

Ball Lightning also explores the origin story for Professor Ding Yi, who is a key character from the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Ding Yi's origin story gave us some insights into his character. Without spoiling the story too much, there is a very big discovery at end of the book, and it sets up the stage for the first book in the trilogy, The Three Body Problem.

This book touched on interesting philosophies, and although the book is speculative fiction, but the author did offer a very interesting solution to the mystery of ball lightning. I will not spoil what this solution entails, but let me just say it involves thinking outside the box, beyond the traditional thinking pattern of "cause and effect". In the book's afterwords Cixin Liu said the solution is purely his own extrapolations (and he is writing speculative fictions after all), so if one day scientists do manage to answer the mystery of ball lightning, then the solution is unlikely to resemble the one from his book. But hey, the stuff about ball lightning is cutting edge, and it would be kind of cool if his "speculations" turn out to be true, and so quoting from Cixin Liu's afterword: "It's the seemingly unlikeliest of possibilities in science fiction stories that tend to become reality, so in the end, who knows?

Ball Lightning is a great science-fiction novel. If you like Arthur C. Clarke or movies like 2001 Space Odyssey, then do yourself a favor and check out this book.