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Ball Lightning

Cixin Liu; Translated by Joel Martinsen

Tor Books

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ISBN10: 076539409X
ISBN13: 9780765394095

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400 Pages

$19.99

CA$26.99

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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. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station.

The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier. 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.

Reviews

Praise for Ball Lightning

"Liu's uncommon gift is the ability to give recognizable shape to some of physics' most difficult concepts—ideas that explain the familiar world around us, but in ways so unfamiliar they seem radically foreign. With them he weaves a world of what-ifs, strung together with subatomic particles, quantum mechanics and the very building blocks of life, then he sets that world in motion and follows where it leads."—NPR

"Ball Lighting has all of the elements that brought Liu bursting onto the world stage with his Three-Body novels: a story of fantastical science and technology, and the dangers they pose in the wrong hands."—The Verge

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Major courses: Higher Mathematics, Theoretical Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Principles and Applications of Computers, Languages and Programming, Dynamic Meteorology, Principles of Synoptic Meteorology, Chinese Meteorology, Statistical...

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About the author

Cixin Liu; Translated by Joel Martinsen

CIXIN LIU is a prolific and popular science fiction writer in the People's Republic of China. Liu is a winner of the Hugo Award and a multiple winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and the Xing Yun Award (the Chinese Nebula). He lives with his family in Yangquan, Shanxi.

Liu is the author of The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End), and Ball Lightning.

JOEL MARTINSEN (translator) is research director for a media intelligence company. His translations have appeared in Words Without Borders and Pathlight. He lives in Edinburgh.

Cixin Liu

Read Author Interview at China Daily

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