I often use my intuition to select my next read. One advantage of that approach is how it protects and honors the plot. I don’t arrive at the book already aware of everything it will be about, but rather discover the story as it unfolds, as most authors intend.  In the case of “Ball Lightning” by Cixin Liu, that discovery process paid high dividends.  The book actually altered my perception of Reality in a lasting way, as great science fiction best serves to.  I would like to preserve the possibility of that outcome for you, so this review will also be an exercise in discretion regarding spoilers.  I am not going to give away the brilliant surprises and wonderfully weird expressions of poetic license that occur along the way. With the hope of inspiring interest, I will simply note that they shine—at times incandescently.

It’s a fitting metaphor for a book about lightning.  Is this book about lightning?  Like lightning itself, that plot point flashes forward as the clear foreground concern for the reader. It carries the story. But it also opens the story into surrealist science.  If only to enjoy greater familiarity with a rare meteorological phenomenon, one does well to participate vicariously in the suspenseful investigation performed here, as if the book is detective fiction and the electricity laboratory is the crime scene.  That said, this lightning is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.  It defies the laws of Physics; it leaves no fingerprints; and its aloofness is otherworldly.  Meanwhile, its primary attraction to each of the main characters is also so painfully personal that the novel accomplishes a satisfying pathos in its final chapters. You likely won’t see it coming even as I suggest it will.

One further pleasure for me was how the novel slowly matches form with content regarding its most ambitious theme.  Let’s say you decided that the nature of Reality was not solely objective and quantifiable, but also had a great deal to do with the observer who is taking the measurements.  Let’s say you entertained the hypothesis that the observer is part of the reason the observed even happens in the first place, and how it happens.  If you happen to be writing a novel that invites this kind of philosophical speculation, how terrific would it therefore be if your disclosure of the story transitioned from direct 1st-person narrative to nearly 3rd-person narrative as additional main characters claim the pages, and finally to having one of those characters tell the ending to another for you, so that nothing about the conclusion can avoid the big question of what role observation always plays?  For me, form met content in this manner and the book gained an extra credit point for integrity of storytelling technique.

But far and away the most gripping aspect of “Ball Lightning” for me was how it altered my perception of Reality.  This author affected me that way once before when I read “The Three-Body Problem,” a more recent trilogy of his that eventually cemented him on the map for readers in English.  In both cases, the sequence has been such that 1) I gasped; 2) I momentarily lost my breath; 3) I went blank mentally for several seconds while my thinking reset to permit startling new possibilities; and 4) I broke into a big smile and enjoyed my own eyes as if for the first time.  That effect slowly faded, but never reversed.  The common cause was Liu’s epic connection to scale and his masterful dexterity about destroying it.  For science fiction he is a mad-hatter Lewis Carroll, decanting potent “eat me” and “drink me” potions to the whole universe.