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.    

Philip K. Dick wrote Ubik in 1969, well into his career, perhaps as its acme; the storytelling and reality-bending are that good. In 2009 the book found its rightful place on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, not that Dick fans needed that validation. The road to fandom with Philip K. Dick can strike like lightning or creep up on you slowly. Once you’re on it, the originality and genius of sci-fi’s modern master loom ever larger.

Why wouldn’t they? Frequently enough, Dick infuses his work with philosophical interests of vital importance to him at the time of writing. In the case of Ubik, he was deeply engaged by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (aka the Bardo Thodol), which basically maps the terrain that consciousness travels after death during the bardo state, the interval between death and one’s next rebirth, a Buddhist point of view involving reincarnation and how to manage it wisely.

Assuming its own spin on that system, Ubik presents a near future in which psychic abilities have a corporate presence in the world, and big business depends on talented mediums both for gaining an upper hand on competitors and for protecting against surveillance by them. All the active characters in the book are part of a dominant company that offers such protection: Runciter Associates. Together, they stumble into a giant misadventure that warps all notions of living versus limbo.

That skillful erosion of assumed reality is where Ubik really shines. It simultaneously puts its cast and its readers through a disorienting discovery process with no obvious resolution ahead, raising plentiful questions along the way. You may find yourself asking how safe it really is to trust the things you are typically entirely certain about, such as being who you think you are in the life you think you lead. Because the book is also very funny, it somehow elicits this grave introspection in a way that feels playful and liberating, not morose or heavy. Yes, the word “grave” in the prior sentence is a smashing good pun.

Do I recommend this book? Yes. If you want to go for a superlative ride in the fine mind of an American master at the top of his game, Ubik is a unique sci-fi offering that perfectly combines philosophical sophistication with pulp sensibilities. It leaves no loose ends in terms of answering to its own suspense, yet the answers it provides also touch on greater metaphysical speculation. In fact, the ending is so correct that it fully cements the novel’s resident spirituality. I read this book again immediately after finishing it. I might thrice.

Because several of his books sparkle with incandescent genius, I will read pretty much anything by Philip K. Dick and do eventually want to read everything by him. The latest addition to that pleasure in my life is his novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. If I had to get literary critical about it and rate the book as a reading experience, my conscience would demand the admission that for me the book was thin in terms of commanding my attention with either plot or character development and something unusual happens in the first chapter that never integrates much later, leaving a puzzling non sequitur where a denouement ought to come. That said, I still feel great love for the book and its camp satire of celebrity worship.

Written over 40 years ago, the book rings more true today than ever. Its world is an advance vision of ours. The main character is a TV and music celebrity whose success is defined by how many million audience members he has, not unlike racking up “views” on YouTube or “likes” on Facebook and Instagram. Quantified popularity makes the man, or breaks him. But the only ones who get a shot at it in the first place have a revealing common trait: they are good looking. Dick basically calls out the heavy social bias for attractiveness and the privileges it provides in terms of access to wealth and luxurious lifestyle. Good-looking people are superior members of society and everyone worships and fawns over them. Witnessing this treatment as a fiction really brings home that in real life it isn’t one.

The book also plays with the idea that its privileged class is a political experiment gone wrong, as if by karmic necessity. Celebrities are part of a genetic engineering cycle in its sixth phase: “an elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another.” Apparently if you are fed with a silver spoon, that good luck makes others like you too repugnant to bear, as if Dick is noting the narcissistic pitfalls of popularity. That the original aim for his celebrity class was to set the moral compass of the world, an aspiration now lost and inoperative, makes for a rich point of reflection on the influence of celebrity in ours. At the very least, the book helps to open our eyes by holding this mirror before them.

Days later, the book has an afterglow for me that makes me grateful to have spent time with it, as if it taught me about life. How strange and fundamentally senseless it really is that my culture worships good looks, that good looks give you chances at a life other people can’t often aspire to, that attaining such a life puts you in the public eye, where inevitably you have direct and indirect influence on cultural norms and mores, despite lacking real qualifications to. The situation is alternately laughable, preposterous, and pathetic. The book stirred me to get in touch with those responses to the craziness in the world around me and I feel the better for deeper contact with them. I reflected on my own longing to be beautiful by societal standards and how I too worship those who most clearly are. I looked at that tendency as a projective response, whereby people live that longing vicariously through celebrities.

That said, the best advice in the book lands for me with a disquieting irony as a result, because the main character offers it, himself a celebrity: “If you’re afraid, you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.” On the other hand, unrecognized longing for perfection makes you do the opposite: project it onto others as false idols.