In the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, Liu Cixin managed to blend dozens of incredible, mind-blowing ideas with fun characters and a great story to create one of the greatest sci fi series of all time. In Ball Lightning, Cixin obsesses over a single, mysterious phenomenon—ball lightning—and that’s about it. The characters? A bunch of flat, wooden caricatures who don’t feel or act like humans at all. The story? Mostly a thinly veiled device to explore the physics behind ball lightning. The result? A somewhat interesting exploration of ball lightning (which is a real phenomenon!) that has a few fun moments and creative physics (but nowhere near the level of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past), but also lots of dull prose and plenty of cringe-worthy dialog.
Rating: 3 stars
Yevgeniy Brikman
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