A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. And what other writer would select a first-person narrator who later proceeds to write himself almost completely out of the narrative?Ĭonsistently surprising and absorbing-just not for the usual reasons.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. When Liu writes of war breaking out, we would certainly ask why and against whom: questions that hold no interest for Liu, who declines to enlighten us. We might expect such a complementary pair of protagonists to become romantically involved-but no. When, for instance, philosophical considerations arise, Liu tackles them head-on, as few English-language writers care to do.

What’s of greater import here is the way Liu’s approach differs from what we might expect. Fascinating conundrums and intriguing extrapolations abound-Liu demands a basic scientific literacy of his readers-but the story lacks the visceral tension, generated by the existential threat of hostile aliens, that gave the previous trilogy its edgy brilliance. But neither Lin nor her superiors suffer from any such inhibitions, and they bring in Ding Yi, a brilliant physicist utterly indifferent to any real-world consequences his discoveries and conclusions might have. Encouraged by Lin’s enthusiasm and single-mindedness after years of futile theoretical modeling and pursuing dead ends, Chen glimpses the beginnings of a breakthrough, while his compulsive need for answers helps him suppress doubts about Lin’s ultimate goals. His investigations take him to a remote mountaintop where he encounters Lin Yun, a young and extremely attractive army major obsessed with weaponizing such forces of nature as lightning. He dedicates his career to studying this baffling but well-attested natural phenomenon. A new science-fiction venture from the award-winning Chinese author of the brilliant alien-contact trilogy concluded with Death’s End (2016), whose readers, hopefully, learned to expect the unexpected.Īs a boy, Chen-we’re offered no other name-watches in helpless horror as ball lightning engendered by a powerful electrical storm incinerates his parents.

Ball lightning by cixin liu