I can't even imagine the situation inside Liu Cixin's head. He has a "what if" idea and then explosion after explosion happens. He also has an uncanny ability to create tension not from characters or plot, but from the realm of ideas. Speaking of characters, if you read scifi for character development, then he might not be the best writer for you. You should be able to accept that he comes from a literary tradition that is not western, somewhere where character development is not as important, h...

When I got this book, I freaked out. I mean, let me put it this way: Cixin's imagination is heads and shoulders above most of the crap out there. Maybe even a large portion of a torso. :) So the moment I got it, I started dancing around and played the fool because anyone who puts so many AWESOME ideas on the page is going to make me do the happy-jig.Fast-forward half a second. I'm reading this. I dropped all my other projects like hot potatoes and felt very little guilt about it.The establishing...

Ball lightning is a very, very hard sci-fi book. I guess you know that already though, if you read anything by Liu Cixin, but for those, who haven't - it's a fair warning. Ball lightning is a sci-fi so hard, that even a front runner, a flagman of recent times of this genre - A. Weir's "The Martian" - seems quite a simple science fiction and not a particularly hard one. That said, as "Ball lightning" also explores lots and lots of quantum physics and quantum effects, (and we all sci-fi fans know,...

I was disappointed in this book because the translation was wooden and uninteresting and even repetitive, the characters had zero depth (particularly the protagonist), the plot was rather boring and took forever to move forward. Don't let this discourage you from reading The Three-Body Problem trilogy but this one was a dud. Indeed, it might be a poor translation, but the lack of character depth doesn't do it any favors.Fino's Cixin Liu and other Chinese SciFi and Fantasy ReviewsThe Three Body P...

First off, this was written in 2003. Let's not forget that.Sometimes I give a not-very-good book four stars because I enjoyed it. This is one of those. There are some lyrical paragraphs, but they are spices to a main ingredient of "You see, Billy, ..."It is of course difficult for an author to bring the reader up to speed on hard SF, and I won't guess whether it's easier when you're making up quite a bit of the science. The characters are wooden, and I guess I have to like how the author sets up...

3.5/5 starsCixin Liu greatly examined the effects of obsession, science, and weaponry in Ball Lightning.I’m a fan of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth Past trilogy. The second book in that series, The Dark Forest remains in my personal top three sci-fi novels of all time and will most likely stay there for a very long time. Plus, the fact that Ball Lightning is translated by Joel Martinsen, the same translator of The Dark Forest, made me eager to read this one.Picture: Ball Lightning Chinese cove...

Ball Lightning is great hard sci-fi but is boring AF.I have been a huge fan of Cixin Liu's writing. His 'Remembrance of Earth's Past' series is one of the best science fiction series ever. It combines science with an engrossing storyline; the likes of which I have not read in a long time. So, I had high expectations for Ball Lightning . Unfortunately, Ball Lightning reads like a science text book for the most part and is not even an interesting one (my school texts were far more interesting). It...

I absolutely loved this author's The Three-Body Problem trilogy and was hoping for more of the same with this, one of his earlier books.  As in The Three Body Problem, Liu Cixin explores mind-blowing physics ideas.  The imagination of this man is stunning!  And yet.....I had a difficult time getting involved in this story.  The characters felt flat and I had a hard time caring about any of them.  There were times I was simply blown away and enthralled, utterly captivated, but those were few and

Three Body is my favorite SF series of all times. It surpasses everything I ever read. The protons theory, the two and four dimensions universes, the scope, the droplet, the Singer, in a word The Imagination blew my mind. I expected nothing less from this one, but it did not quite raise to the expectations.Chen, as a fourteen-year-old boy, watched his parents turn to ashes from a ball lightning. From that moment on, he dedicated his life in understanding it. Later on, in order to pursue his life...

4.5 Stars for Ball Lighting (audiobook) by Cixin Liu translated by Joel Martinsen read by Feodor Chin. This is a interesting story set in modern day China. The main character is obsessed with ball lightning and gets the opportunity to study it and develop technology around it. I think the best part of the book is at the end where the author tells about his inspiration for the story and explains how this story is actually a prequel to the Three Body Problem. This story really adds a lot to the no...

You can find my review on my blog by clicking here.Have you ever been so deeply fascinated by something that it hence led you to dedicate all your life into understanding the very core of that object of interest? While finding your purpose in life can lead a person to fully actualize themselves in the long run, this inevitable tunnel vision can also turn toxic one’s self and their immediate social circle. It’s being able to distance yourself from it whenever possible that you put yourself in a p...

3.5*'sInteresting premise and as always the author opens up new worlds to those of us without a working understanding of advance theoretical physics. I didn't love this like I did the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy but it was still very thought provoking. This also serves as a prequel of sorts with some character overlap and the first signs that somebody is watching us.

Man, it's hard to rate this one. The trouble with reading works in translation is that you have no way of knowing how many of the book's faults are inherent in the work and how many of them are due to something getting lost in translation.Using this book as a specific example, the dialogue is painfully stilted, the pacing is mind-numbingly slow and the characters are (mostly) flat and uninteresting. If this book had been written in English, I'd be docking stars left, right and centre for this so...

While this book leaves readers vacillating between the possibility of story being a loose prequel to The Three Body Problem and a solid standalone on its own, Liu collapses that state function in the afterword. Maybe this is a good time to publish an updated version of 'The Dark Forest', with Tyler's actual plan from the chinese version. According to Liu, The Ball Lightning belongs to the earlier strand of chinese science fiction than the expansive category he puts his Trilogy into. Yet, he keep...

I can't get enough of Cixin Liu's incredible imagination and vision. I love everything he's written and Ball Lightning is a brilliant book. It's not the easiest read in the world - its ideas and science are challenging at times- but the effort is so worth while. Love these characters, their stories and this vision of co-existing dimensions. I also saw Ball Lightning myself many years ago and so I read this with extra fascination. Review to follow shortly on For Winter Nights.

When I was a child I was rather obsessed with unexplained phenomena - not supernatural events, but scientific oddities. Ball nightning was one. I haven't thought of it for 25 years, but this brought it all back. All the theories, which apparently still are going strong, were deeply fascinating. I adore Liu's scientific focus, and all the lengthy explanations. However I must say I had a hard time actually picturing the practical use of it, especially weaponized, so I lost track a bit of what was

An imaginative and gripping read, if you can tolerate Liu's usual superficial female typologies: either intelligent, childish, fatally flawed, and overly confident with dire consequences for humanity, or just insignificant. Despite this, I still was able to mostly enjoy the book.

Ball Lightning, by the author of The Three Body Problem, is the story of a man who watches his parents get incinerated by ball lightning and ends up devoting his life to the study and control of ball lightning. Evidently a real phenomenon that is rarely observed and not well understood, the book starts by having him go through the current scientific theories but then the science gets into increasingly exotic macroscale quantum mechanics as his search takes him increasingly through Chinese and ev...

"I knew I was leaving something behind forever, and I knew I would never return." Word of warning: do not read this Liu Cixin book first if you're just getting into the author. Read The Three Body Problem.Review: Liu Cixin does it again. I can't believe i'm giving a book five stars that really had me wondering if I was going to finish it at all during its first third, and then becoming overwhelmed with WTF (in a good way) in the final third. There's a whole bunch of science mumbo jumbo that yo

A book that is as single-mindedly focused on ball lightning as the characters are.The characters here are so thin that they barely have names. (Seriously: you learn the main character’s name only from dialogue, and it appears, like, twice in the book.) The main character barely has a mental life at all, and I definitely think this is the weakest part of the book, but it is worth saying that the whole point of this book is that the characters pursue the mystery of ball lightning at the expense of...