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March 1, 2020
Ball Lightning — Cixin Liu
It's been a year or so since I've read science fiction so when I happened on this 2004 novel by Cixin Liu, author of the stupendous "The Three-Body Problem," I took a flutter.
Chinese science fiction was well under the radar for a long, long time until it exploded into excellent English translations and became a leading force in the field.
This book is so good in translation (published in 2018 in English), it must be sublime in the original Chinese for it to retain as much wonder and mystery as it does.
Cixin Liu, born in 1963, is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award, China's most prestigious literary science fiction award, and winner of the 2015 Hugo Award for "The Three Body Problem."
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) remarked, "A book should be like a ball of lightning in the hand."
Art imitates art.
March 1, 2020 at 04:01 PM | Permalink
Comments
I loved 3BP but hated the followup. And realized it had a completely different translator. It is weird how much this changed the book...I'd love to see what Ken Liu could do with translating this.
BTW -- I never realized they both had the same family name until you reversed the order above! The book I have has his name in natural order! Weird coincidence!
Posted by: clif | Mar 2, 2020 9:58:58 AM
