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. 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. 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. 'Wildly imaginative.'-Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogyĪt the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

While Chen’s quest for answers gives purpose to his lonely life, it also pits him against soldiers and scientists with motives of their own: a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge. The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. When Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of this mysterious natural phenomenon. From the New York Times bestselling author of the Three-Body Trilogy, Cixin Liu's Ball Lightning is the story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against the drive to harness new discoveries with no consideration of their possible consequences.

Ball Lightning by Liu Cixin