Ball Lightning

About

When Chen's parents are incinerated before his eyes by a bolt of ball lightning, he dedicates his life to understanding the phenomenon. His obsession takes him to mountaintop storms, Soviet-era research stations, and a military weapons lab where a brilliant army major sees in ball lightning not a mystery to solve but a weapon to build. The deeper Chen goes, the more he realizes that ball lightning is the surface of something far stranger — a frontier where physics breaks its own rules. Cixin Liu writes science fiction where the wonder of discovery and the horror of its applications are inseparable. Ball Lightning is the novel that preceded the Three-Body Problem, and it shares that trilogy's central tension: the beauty of knowledge versus the recklessness of those who wield it. A novel about what happens when the universe offers you a secret — and you have to decide whether knowing it is worth the cost.