Married to the Job: Chen at one point says that for Dr.However, Lin Yun is still horrified at the sight of children incinerated along with the terrorists holding them hostage, and clearly feels remorse for their deaths. Ding are so obsessed by their work (weapon development and theoretical physics, respectively) that they care very little about other people. Lack of Empathy: Both Major Lin Yun and Dr.Just Think of the Potential!: The most typical argument of Major Lin Yun, when discussing various inventions and experiments.He was forced to change his name (because it sounds like Khrushchev), isolated for years being considered insane, and saw his girlfriend being disintegrated before him.

His university professor's past is equally bad if not worse.Dark and Troubled Past: Chen's first encounter with the ball lightning traumatized him for a year, locked in a hospital.However, they are still mostly called 'ball lightning', and some James Bond fans in the book called them 'Thunderballs'.

Call a Smeerp a 'Rabbit': As it turned out, the titular Ball Lightnings are in fact not weather anomalies but electrically charged projections of 'Macro-Electrons', a physical structure largely unknown to humans.

Also some eco-terrorists who become the first practice-targets when they hold up the biggest nuclear power plant in China. Guess what? Though some of them only got their fingernails and toenails disintegrated.

Asshole Victim: Most people tend to touch ball lightnings when they appear around them.

Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: The power plant the eco-terrorists held up still uses the same technology as the Soviet era Chernobyl plant, even though it is claimed as the most advanced in Asia.

Abnormal Ammo: The Lightning Machineguns developed by the researchers fire supercharged macro electrons that can disintegrate anything in front of them until the charge runs out.

He becomes disgusted with the thought of his pure scientific research being used for killing, but every time he tries to escape, his obsession draws him back in.īall Lightning contains the following tropes: His quest takes him to a national defense research institute where government scientists are seeking to use ball lightning as a new-concept weapon. Chen, who witnesses both his parents get disintegrated by ball lightning, devotes his entire life to researching the poorly understood phenomenon. As shown by its sequel, the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.ĭr. Chen and Major Lin Yun's pursuit and research of the eponymous anomaly, its weaponization and a war that. It was first published in English in 2018, with a translation by Joel Martensen of. Ball Lightning is a 2004 Chinese science-fiction novel by Liu Cixin (best known for The Three-Body Problem), possibly the single most popular sci-fi novel in China.

Ball lightning cixin liu