Ball Lightning

I picked up this book because I want to read the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and I was told Ball Lightning was a sort of prequel. I don't know if it's true, but this book wasn't that amusing. The pace was slow, more hardcore sci-fi than I expected, and I turned out to be really interesting in the last chapters. I have mixed feelings for some characters (especially Lin Yun), but I wasn't impressed by the others either. I don't think character development was important in this book, so maybe that's the reason why I don't feel compelled for any of them. All in all, it was a decent read, and I'm definitely reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy because it seems to be way better than this book.

I loved the three body problem trilogy but ball lightning was no where near those levels. The first 2/3s of the book were alright but after a character comes back and starts telling their 20 page long life story it got very long in the tooth. The bit at the very end got me interested but all in all I can't say this lives up to three body.
Still worth a read but skim the parts you don't like.

For a little context, I rated the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy very highly overall. I did this despite having complaints that I mentioned in the reviews about the characterization, the casual sexism, and the info dumps. But I still loved the series, because there are few Science Fiction authors better than Liu Cixin at taking a hypothetical or theoretical principal, inserting it into a fictional setting and building a world out of the things that aren't solvable today or that are dreamed up today.

In that trilogy the plot was so incredibly compelling and the atmosphere of fear and this heavy blanket of bleakness...I ate it up. So even though I have a lot of complaints, I gave the books a 3, 4, and 5 as I became more and more invested in this first contact story with it's incredibly interesting Scientific and imaginative idea's.

This review isn't about the trilogy, but it highlights how something very flawed can still be loved immensely. That is not the case for Ball Lightning. The same complaints exist for me (which given this was written before the trilogy isn't surprising), but the things I enjoyed in said trilogy are gone as well. There's a plot line, but not one that is very interesting,  get the same flat characters in both characterization and dialogue, even more info dumps (some points feel like a textbook), the great atmosphere from the trilogy is gone and hell there's not even an antagonist to root for or against. To me it is very much a book where the hard science fiction was given precedence over the story and the story suffers for it.

I don't like reviews to be all negative though. So what I will say is had never heard of the phenomenon Ball Lightning. So because of this book I had a fascinating time researching more about that. So I did at least get something from the novel.

This is very clearly an early work by a writer still honing his craft and who perhaps relied on a badly-translated “Guide to Writing Novels” that you used to be able to order from the back of Mad Magazine in the 1960's. It's all very Romantic and picaresque, and cast with stock characters: the mad scientist; the lone wolf; the breathtakingly beautiful but brilliant soldier-woman-scientist; the mysterious keeper of the ancient wisdom; the handsome warrior; the gruff general. All the stuff of a straight-to-DVD SF thriller if it were a movie. What redeems it, if anything, is Liu's innovative explanation for ball lightning (a term that gets used at least 10 times on every page, maddeningly), an elusive and strange natural phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for centuries.

Liu would go on to learn a lot more about how to write compelling fiction, and his Three Body Problem made him an international bestselling writer in hard SF. And interestingly enough, he plants the seeds of the latter novel in this one – though whether by design or not is unclear. So should you read it? I don't know. It's really not a great work: wooden dialogue, slothful pacing, cartoonish plot, weak characters, deus ex machina ending. But the premise is interesting, and despite Liu's ham-handedness with the keyboard, there are a few good scenes here and there. Load it on your ebook and read it on your daily commute. If nothing else, it will make the subway ride a little less tedious.