Review | Chinese science-fiction author Liu Cixin’s Ball Lightning rewards readers patient enough to navigate the techspeak

Ball Lightning
by Liu Cixin (translated by Joel Martinsen)
Tor Books

The book’s origins are described in an afterword that begins with an almost comical cliché: “It was a stormy night …” In the summer of 1982, Liu was in the city of Handan, Hebei province, where he witnessed a spectacular storm: “Blue arcs of electricity flashed […] an object materialised beneath a tree and drifted ghostlike through the air, illuminating the surrounding rain with its orange glow. And as it floated, it seemed to play the sound of a xun [a traditional Chinese wind instrument]. Less than 20 seconds later it disappeared.”

This is ball lightning – a real, but extremely rare natural phenomenon. What made this event life-changing for Liu was its proximity to another exceptional experience: “That same year, I read two books by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama.” This pair would directly inspire The Three-Body Problem. But Ball Lightning, by contrast, emerges from a different tradition: the Chinese “invention story”.

Unlike the Promethean dystopias favoured by Western novelists, which linger on the detrimental effects of scientific innovation (see Frankenstein, for example), Chinese writers are “preoccupied with the description of a futuristic tech­nological device and speculation on its immediate positive effects”, Liu writes.

This just about describes Ball Lightning, which opens on a note of raw emotion. Fourteen-year-old Chen is celebrating his birthday with his parents. Outside thunder rumbles and lightning flashes: “On a stormy night, you get a sense of how precarious family life really is,” Chen thinks, with what proves to be double prophecy. Suddenly, one arc pierces the wall forming a basketball of hazy red energy that, after hovering around the terrified trio, incinerates Chen’s mother and father.