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mikavon 's review for:
Ball Lightning
by Cixin Liu
<3
I loved this book... except for some parts. Namely, the genius physicist who comes in half way through and explains everything, and the female General's weirdly irrelevant story at the end.
Like the Three Body Problem, this book starts with something within the scope of reality and just keeps expounding on it until it becomes something crazy. Here, it's "ball lightning", which is apparently a real thing. You start out with no idea what it is--you only know that it does some pretty crazy sci-fi stuff, like turn people to ash and burn the tshirt off a person while leaving the jacket overtop completely intact. The mc slowly researches it and reveals the mysteries and it was so much fun to watch him make discoveries and slowly reveal what ball lightning really is.
But then they bring in some genius guy (who sounded like a surfer, which was an annoying voice for the audiobook narrator to use...), and he strips away all the fun of the investigation and simply tells us all the answers from then on. It was a weird route for the book to take, and it sapped all the fun out of the mystery... it would have been so much crazier to find out about all this quantum state stuff if the mc had discovered it and come to conclusions about it on his own, rather than the surfer dude simply telling us everything.
So, that sort of ruined the book for me.
And then you have this weird monologue at the end where the General woman and her father are talking about her childhood as though they both didn't already know the story. They were telling the memory to each other for the reader's benefit, and it made for a super awkward and poorly written conversation. Not to mention the fact that no one cares about her story... I just wanted to know more about macroparticles.
I also didn't like the anti-science terrorist group, lol. Kinda lame. Oh but I loved that the army murdered all those children without a second thought because, come on, it really was the only option. Any other book would have included an idealistic debate about murdering a bunch of kids, but not here~ it was refreshing.
So, 3 stars. It had the same sort of feel as the Three Body Problem, but with a much smaller scope.
I loved this book... except for some parts. Namely, the genius physicist who comes in half way through and explains everything, and the female General's weirdly irrelevant story at the end.
Like the Three Body Problem, this book starts with something within the scope of reality and just keeps expounding on it until it becomes something crazy. Here, it's "ball lightning", which is apparently a real thing. You start out with no idea what it is--you only know that it does some pretty crazy sci-fi stuff, like turn people to ash and burn the tshirt off a person while leaving the jacket overtop completely intact. The mc slowly researches it and reveals the mysteries and it was so much fun to watch him make discoveries and slowly reveal what ball lightning really is.
But then they bring in some genius guy (who sounded like a surfer, which was an annoying voice for the audiobook narrator to use...), and he strips away all the fun of the investigation and simply tells us all the answers from then on. It was a weird route for the book to take, and it sapped all the fun out of the mystery... it would have been so much crazier to find out about all this quantum state stuff if the mc had discovered it and come to conclusions about it on his own, rather than the surfer dude simply telling us everything.
So, that sort of ruined the book for me.
And then you have this weird monologue at the end where the General woman and her father are talking about her childhood as though they both didn't already know the story. They were telling the memory to each other for the reader's benefit, and it made for a super awkward and poorly written conversation. Not to mention the fact that no one cares about her story... I just wanted to know more about macroparticles.
I also didn't like the anti-science terrorist group, lol. Kinda lame. Oh but I loved that the army murdered all those children without a second thought because, come on, it really was the only option. Any other book would have included an idealistic debate about murdering a bunch of kids, but not here~ it was refreshing.
So, 3 stars. It had the same sort of feel as the Three Body Problem, but with a much smaller scope.