The science of a good story

The novel left a lot of space for contemplation and interpretation about what happens when the pursuit of knowledge runs up against the drive to harness new discoveries with no consideration of their possible consequences.

Already receiving rave reviews, Publishers Weekly said of Ball Lightning: "Readers intrigued by cutting-edge and slightly speculative science, and the philosophy of scientific ethics, will want to pick up this fine novel."

Liu told China Daily before he departed from Beijing to Frankfurt that even he can't tell which one is his true intention for the story: the magnificent science, the ethics, the childhood psychoanalysis or its views on the army and war.

As such he maintains the attitude that "it's better for writers to hide behind their work", because as he was quoted previously as saying: "One more explanation (from the author) will block one more way for the readers to imagine. I don't explain to appeal. I just speak about what I truly feel and see."

In fact, Liu records in the afterword of Ball Lightning that he personally witnessed the rarely seen natural phenomenon in 1982 in Henan province, and, ever since, he has found himself accumulating a lot of fanciful ideas about it.

For Liu, however, rarer still in China in the 1980s were translations of the works of Arthur C. Clarke into Chinese. Even though several years had passed since the reform and opening-up began, "fewer than one in tens of thousands" had read the books that would shape Liu's own writing and pave the way for his Three-Body trilogy.

Ball Lightning, first published in 2004, is considered to be a prequel with several key characters from the trilogy making an appearance.

The novel differs from the Three Body trilogy in that the latter is a manifesto of Liu's ideal of creating something based on a combination of imagining the very grand and the very tiny－or based on the idea of something being imagined out of nothing.

However, Liu says: "Ball Lightning was my trial, creating one part of what I craved as a whole, because the readers, then, were not ready for the latter."

Ten years later, many readers have found themselves obsessed with Three Body's grand storytelling.