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Ball Lightning

In a way, Ball Lightning is a prequel to the Three-Body series, since it concludes with the first appearance of the aliens that would eventually threaten humanity and features a version of Ding Yi, who also appears in later books. At the end of the novel, when humanity detects the presence of a mysterious, omnipresent observer that causes ball lightning’s quantum state to collapse, the narrator, Dr. Chen, remarks, “If you are really able to prove that a super-observer is watching our world, then human activity becomes very indiscreet…. You could say human society is in a quantum state, and a super-observer will force it to collapse to a state of reason again.” However, society’s reaction is the exact opposite of what Chen predicts, because the super-observer is far more sinister than even humanity: unlike ball lightning, which coexists with the human world, the alien super-observer will overturn human society and push Earth civilization to the brink of extinction.

* * *

Eight years after this book’s first publication, during a thunderstorm in the city of Lanzhou in July 2012, a research team from Northwest Normal University conducted spectral and video observations of a ball of lightning five meters in diameter that appeared unexpectedly. The team’s recording, from the initial appearance of the phenomenon until it vanished, marked the first scientific observation of ball lightning in the wild.

In fact, ball lightning is not an especially rare phenomenon, and the progress of research in recent years suggests that its mystery is close to being solved. When that day comes, one thing is certain: the scientific explanation for ball lightning will be nothing like what’s described in this book. Science fiction writers may consider many angles on a subject, but they always choose to write about the least likely. Of the myriad possible predictions of the behavior of cosmic civilization, the Three-Body series selected the darkest, most disastrous one. So too with this novel, which describes what may be the most outlandish of possibilities, but also the most interesting and romantic. It is purely a creation of the imagination: curved space filled with lightning energy, an incorporeal bubble, an electron the size of a soccer ball. The world of the novel is the gray world of reality—the familiar gray sky and clouds, gray landscape and sea, gray people and life—but within that gray, mundane world something small and surreal drifts by unnoticed, like a speck of dust tumbling out of a dream, suggesting the vast mysteries of the cosmos, the possibility of a world entirely unlike our own.

One last thing: It’s the seemingly unlikeliest of possibilities in science fiction stories that tend to become reality, so in the end, who knows?

SFF Newsletterbit.ly/SFFHOZAbout Cixin Liu

CIXIN LIU is China’s leading SF writer. He is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award (China’s most prestigious literary science fiction award), a two-time winner of the Nebula (Xingyun) award and winner of the Hugo and Locus awards for Best Novel. Before becoming a writer, he was a computer hardware engineer. He lives in Yangquan city, Shanxi province, with his wife and daughter.

About Joel Martinsen

JOEL MARTINSEN is also the translator of The Dark Forest, the second volume of The Three-Body Trilogy. He lives in Beijing.

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Originally published as 球状闪电 in 2005 by Sichuan Science & Technology Press in Chengdu, China. First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Tor, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates LLC

First published in the UK by Head of Zeus in 2018

The moral right of 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Translation by Joel Martinsen

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