![]() While Yun becomes a key character early on, it is not until toward the end, when Chen decides to leave the macro-electron project after it proves destructively weaponizable, that she occupies equal characterological footing with Chen. This discovery leads to another: macro-nuclei of macro-atoms, which can produce enormous cold fusion explosions. The novel is written in Chen’s first person and tracks in close detail his developing theory of ball lightning, his collaboration with Yun on its military application, and eventually their discovery that ball lightning is in fact macro-electrons forming the building blocks of a macro-universe. Lin Yun researches “new-concept weapons” for the Chinese military, a response to her mother’s death by genetically engineered attack bees during the 1980s border war with Vietnam. Chen wants to understand ball lightning, a real-world phenomenon that as yet has no scientific explanation, after his parents are killed by an instance of it on his fourteenth birthday. Ball Lightning, then, has a lot of hype behind it, and while it may not be as sweeping a study of (inter)national politics, humanity, and the alien as the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, it is an important-and timely-meditation on science, weapons development, and the ways in which people confront trauma.īall Lightning tells the story of two Chinese nationals driven to science by loss. In addition to its Chinese awards, The Three-Body Problem nabbed the Hugo Award for Best Novel and nominations for nearly every major genre award, not to mention a plug by then-President Obama in the New York Times (see WLT, Sept. Ball Lightning is Liu’s fourth book in English, the first three having comprised a hard science-fiction trilogy about alien contact and human political struggles among themselves and with the aliens. Because of the 2014 English translation of his novel The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction has been in high demand in the American market. Professor Brian Tanner, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics, Durham University, said: "Ball lightning is a rare weather event that is still not understood today.Multiple-award-winning Chinese science-fiction author Cixin Liu is having a moment in the anglophone world. The Durham researchers compared the text in Gervase's Chronicle with historical and modern reports of ball lightning. He went on to describe a dense and dark cloud, emitting a white substance which grew into a spherical shape under the cloud, from which a fiery globe fell towards the river. In his Chronicle, composed around 1200, Gervase stated that "a marvelous sign descended near London" on 7 June 1195. ![]() The findings are published in the Royal Meteorological Society's journal, Weather. The account, by the 12th century Benedictine monk Gervase of Christ Church Cathedral Priory, Canterbury, pre-dates the previous earliest known description of ball lightning recorded in England by nearly 450 years. Working together, physicist Emeritus Professor Brian Tanner and historian Professor Giles Gasper, of Durham University, UK, made the connection to a ball lightning event while exploring a medieval text written some 750 years ago. Ball lightning, usually associated with thunderstorms, is unexplained and has been described as a bright spherical object on average 25 centimeters, but sometimes up to several meters, in diameter.
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