Ball Lightning

Afterword

It was a stormy night. When blue arcs of electricity flashed, you could perceive individual raindrops outside the window for the briefest instant. The thunder and lightning had only grown more intense since the downpour began that evening. After one dazzling burst, an object materialized beneath a tree and drifted ghostlike through the air, illuminating the surrounding rain with its orange glow. And as it floated, it seemed to play the sound of a xun. Less than twenty seconds later, it disappeared….

This is no science fiction story, but my eyewitness account of a thunderstorm during the summer of 1982 in the city of Handan, Hebei province, at the southern end of Zhonghua Road, which was remote in those days. After that, you were into farmland. Over the course of the next two decades I found myself accumulating all sorts of fanciful ideas about ball lightning.

That same year, I read two books by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama. The translation of those two books into Chinese marked the introduction of modern western science fiction to mainland China; previously, the country’s exposure to western science fiction had been limited to the work of Verne and Wells.

In these two events I was fortunate, since only about one person in a hundred claims to have seen ball lightning (this figure comes from a paper published in a domestic meteorology journal, but I suspect it is too high), while the number of people in China who have read those two books is probably fewer than one in a thousand. Those books set the foundation for my concept of science fiction and were a catalyst for the later Three-Body trilogy; however, their influence did not extend to Ball Lightning. When I wrote this novel in 2003, I already had a mostly complete Three-Body series, but I felt that Chinese readers would respond more readily to a novel like Ball Lightning at that time.

China’s science fiction was born more than a century ago, at the close of the Qing Dynasty, but for most of its history it developed in relative isolation, and for a long period was entirely cut off from modern western science fiction. The field’s independent development gave the work of that period a distinct style, a difference that is clearly evident from a comparison of Ball Lightning and the Three-Body series.

Chinese science fiction during that closed-off period was dominated by the invention story, a form that was preoccupied with the description of a futuristic technological device and speculation on its immediate positive effects, but which barely touched the invention’s deeper social implications, much less the tremendous ways such technology would transform society. And so it is with Ball Lightning: the emergence of such a powerful technological force is bound to have huge, far-reaching effects on human society—in politics, economics, and even in culture. The book addresses none of this.

But this similarity to early-period Chinese science fiction is only skin-deep; at its heart, this is not a Chinese-style story. The ball lightning described in the book may resemble that sort of futuristic device, but the flights of fancy it gives rise to are nowhere to be found in the science fiction of that period. And while the book is set in a China that is altogether real, those little balls of lightning seem like they’re trying to transcend that reality, like how a man’s tie, within the confines of its narrow dimensions, has the freedom to indulge in a riot of colors and patterns unbounded by the rigid formula of a business suit.

In a way, Ball Lightning is a prequel to the Three-Body series, since it concludes with the first appearance of the aliens that would eventually threaten humanity and features a version of Ding Yi, who also appears in later books. At the end of the novel, when humanity detects the presence of a mysterious, omnipresent observer that causes ball lightning’s quantum state to collapse, the narrator, Dr. Chen, remarks, “If you are really able to prove that a super-observer is watching our world, then human activity becomes very indiscreet…. You could say human society is in a quantum state, and a super-observer will force it to collapse to a state of reason again.” However, society’s reaction is the exact opposite of what Chen predicts, because the super-observer is far more sinister than even humanity: unlike ball lightning, which coexists with the human world, the alien super-observer will overturn human society and push Earth civilization to the brink of extinction.

Eight years after this book’s first publication, during a thunderstorm in the city of Lanzhou in July 2012, a research team from Northwest Normal University conducted spectral and video observations of a ball of lightning five meters in diameter that appeared unexpectedly. The team’s recording, from the initial appearance of the phenomenon until it vanished, marked the first scientific observation of ball lightning in the wild.

In fact, ball lightning is not an especially rare phenomenon, and the progress of research in recent years suggests that its mystery is close to being solved. When that day comes, one thing is certain: the scientific explanation for ball lightning will be nothing like what’s described in this book. Science fiction writers may consider many angles on a subject, but they always choose to write about the least likely. Of the myriad possible predictions of the behavior of cosmic civilization, the Three-Body series selected the darkest, most disastrous one. So too with this novel, which describes what may be the most outlandish of possibilities, but also the most interesting and romantic. It is purely a creation of the imagination: curved space filled with lightning energy, an incorporeal bubble, an electron the size of a soccer ball. The world of the novel is the gray world of reality—the familiar gray sky and clouds, gray landscape and sea, gray people and life—but within that gray, mundane world something small and surreal drifts by unnoticed, like a speck of dust tumbling out of a dream, suggesting the vast mysteries of the cosmos, the possibility of a world entirely unlike our own.

One last thing: It’s the seemingly unlikeliest of possibilities in science fiction stories that tend to become reality, so in the end, who knows?