Ball Lightning

Ball Lightning (球状闪电 - Qiúzhuàng shǎndiàn) by Liu Cixin is a hard science fiction novel that loosely leads up to the author's later Three-Body Problem trilogy. Liu apparently wrote Ball Lightning while thinking he was about to die to liver cancer he was misdiagnosed with. That kind of explains the heavily philosophical prologue and I suppose the book's ending, which I didn't like all that much due to it leaning so much on metaphysical quantum nonsense.

The novel's first-person protagonist is Chen (addressed solely by his family name, with the doctor title later on) who witnesses his parents getting killed by a ball lightning on his 14th birthday. That sparks his obsession with the rare and unexplained phenomenon. Chen sets on an academic career path that will hopefully help him to understand what on earth is a ball lightning and why his parents died.

I have been aware of ball lightnings since I was a kid but I think due to many years passing without me ever seeing or hearing a mention led me to forget all about them. Only last year during my Metro trilogy run -- might have been as far as Exodus already -- I realized that the lightning ball anomalies in the series -- and in the Stalker games too -- are in fact ball lightnings! At that point I also recalled how during thunderstorms my grandma used to tell a story about a ball lightning encounter. I don't remember if she had witnessed it or if it was a secondhand story but I do remember thinking of it and ball lightnings in general as old folk's fairytales. Liu Cixin himself too has witnessed a ball lightning according to the novel's Wikipedia article.

In the book, Chen studies atmospheric sciences, later wishing he had gone for physics instead with how the ball lightnings turned out. His doctorate is theoretical in nature because it's rather difficult to study a phenomenon that can't be recreated at will. The first part of the novel is the difficult journey to find out how a ball lightning could be created -- a journey that ends in despair. It's discovered that it is actually very possible to create a ball lightning, and a certain nation's researchers were doing so for years. The despair comes from the fact that despite having created multiple ball lightnings, they had never managed to figure out the parameters.

The novel provides a great view to a possible foray to how humanity's knowledge truly expanding research could be made. A passion for the subject needs to meet the resources: military very possibly being able to provide the latter -- Chen is recruited to a military technology research team by Major Lin Yun.

I thought Chen's ponderings on fundamental research to be rather insightful, too: how it is needed as a base to be able to do breakthrough science but also how it sets the limits of known reality -- phenomena without any related fundamental research is like outside the realm of possibilities.

The second part of the novel starts with Chen realizing what ball lightnings could be: something already existing getting charged by lightning. It takes theoretical physicist Ding Yi to actually figure things out, though. Chen and the rest of the research team start making actual progress, soon having a weapon in their hands.

Part of the seemingly odd behavior of ball lightnings got explained by quantum physics: the act of observation affects them. I was left rather perplexed by the whole concept; it felt like a magical rule. How does passive observation alter the quantum state of something? What even counts as observing? Camera recording apparently does but what about insects or plants? An implication of extraterrestrial life is allegedly proven by some ball lightnings in tests behaving as if observed even with nothing being there to witness them.

Ball Lightning's Wikipedia article -- and even the back cover of the Finnish translation of the novel (by Rauno Sainio) -- mention the book being considered a prequel to The Three-Body Problem. That however conflicts with the definition of a prequel which is a type of sequel. As far as I can tell, this novel was published first: there was nothing for it to be a prequel to in 2004. People tend to incorrectly use the word prequel to refer to a piece of narrative work that is earlier in an internal chronological sequence, regardless of when it was published -- maybe because they're not aware of the word predecessor or it doesn't sound right? The Three-Body Problem trilogy is a (loose) sequel to Ball Lightning, though: Ding Yi appears in the trilogy and Lin Yun is mentioned.