Publishers Weekly
06/11/2018
In Chinese folklore, ball lightning is known as “ghost lanterns,” and ghosts of a quantum kind haunt this thoughtful technothriller about the science of the next war. Chen, traumatized when ball lightning invades his birthday party and kills his parents, resolves to understand the elusive phenomenon, despite discouragement from his similarly hurt advisor. Encountering evidence that others have been struck by ball lightning but survived, he teams up with Lin Yun, a young major in the Chinese army with her own obsession: “new concept” weapons. Together, they track down a lost Russian research base and an eccentric Chinese genius, bringing together the clues that reveal ball lightning’s secrets in time for it to be weaponized for a conflict with America. Liu (the Three-Body Problem trilogy) pits the quest for theoretical knowledge against the push for practical, if deadly, applications. Without tilting the debate, he moves his characters through both their fears and their desires, showing how neither purity nor repudiation will bring more than a measure of personal relief. Readers intrigued by cutting-edge and slightly speculative science, and the philosophy of scientific ethics, will want to pick up this fine novel. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"Wildly imaginative, really interesting." -President Barack Obama on the Three-Body Problem trilogy
“A breakthrough book . . . a unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation, politics and history, conspiracy theory and cosmology.” —George R. R. Martin, on The Three Body Problem
“Extraordinary.” —The New Yorker, on The Three Body Problem
“Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review, on The Three Body Problem
"A must-read in any language.” —Booklist, on The Three Body Problem
"A meditation on technology, progress, morality, extinction, and knowledge that doubles as a cosmos-in-the-balance thriller.... a testament to just how far [Liu's] own towering imagination has taken him: Far beyond the borders of his country, and forever into the canon of science fiction. - NPR, on Death's End
"The best kind of science fiction, familiar but strange all at the same time." — Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Three Body Problem
SEPTEMBER 2018 - AudioFile
Using a half dozen accents, narrator Feodor Chin brings his video and computer game voice-over experience to the fore. Hugo Award-winning novelist Cixin Liu’s military science fiction explores what might happen if the rare natural phenomenon of ball lightning were harnessed. Could it be used as a potent energy source or possibly as an unstoppable superweapon? The novel is part magical realism, part rumination on particle physics. Chin keeps the characters sounding vulnerable as two Chinese scientists grapple with their pasts and their ethics while madly working to create a new bomb that could destroy the world. This solid speculative fiction makes for good listening. B.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-28
A new science-fiction venture from the award-winning Chinese author of the brilliant alien-contact trilogy concluded with Death's End (2016), whose readers, hopefully, learned to expect the unexpected.As a boy, Chen—we're offered no other name—watches in helpless horror as ball lightning engendered by a powerful electrical storm incinerates his parents. He dedicates his career to studying this baffling but well-attested natural phenomenon. His investigations take him to a remote mountaintop where he encounters Lin Yun, a young and extremely attractive army major obsessed with weaponizing such forces of nature as lightning. Encouraged by Lin's enthusiasm and single-mindedness after years of futile theoretical modeling and pursuing dead ends, Chen glimpses the beginnings of a breakthrough, while his compulsive need for answers helps him suppress doubts about Lin's ultimate goals. But neither Lin nor her superiors suffer from any such inhibitions, and they bring in Ding Yi, a brilliant physicist utterly indifferent to any real-world consequences his discoveries and conclusions might have. Fascinating conundrums and intriguing extrapolations abound—Liu demands a basic scientific literacy of his readers—but the story lacks the visceral tension, generated by the existential threat of hostile aliens, that gave the previous trilogy its edgy brilliance. What's of greater import here is the way Liu's approach differs from what we might expect. When, for instance, philosophical considerations arise, Liu tackles them head-on, as few English-language writers care to do. We might expect such a complementary pair of protagonists to become romantically involved—but no. When Liu writes of war breaking out, we would certainly ask why and against whom: questions that hold no interest for Liu, who declines to enlighten us. And what other writer would select a first-person narrator who later proceeds to write himself almost completely out of the narrative?Consistently surprising and absorbing—just not for the usual reasons.
