Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

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?

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.

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

Copyright © 2005 by 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin)

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.

English translation © 2018 by China Educational Publications Import & Export Corp., Ltd

Translation by Joel Martinsen

The first three chapters of this translation appeared in the online magazine Words Without Borders in a slightly different form in 2009.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (E) 9781786694676

ISBN (HB) 9781786694683

ISBN (XTPB) 9781786694690

Jacket illustration © Stephan Martinière £18.99

Author Photo: Li Yibo

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Plans for the Sanmenxia Dam, a gravity dam on the Yellow River in Henan Province near the border with Shanxi Province, were drawn up in the mid-1950s with the help of Soviet engineers. Construction lasted from 1957 to 1960, and the reservoir began to silt up immediately afterward, causing flooding on the Wei River that required decades of renovation work to control.

George Gamow (1904–1968), theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He defected in 1933 and ended up in the United States.