Liu Cixin is the featured author in READ PAPER REPUBLIC, week 22, 12 November 2015. The second book in the series, The Dark Forest – translated by Joel Martinsen – was released in August 2015. In August 2015 The Three Body Problem, Ken Liu's translation of the first volume in Liu Cixin's Three Body ( 三体) trilogy, became the first novel in translation to win a Hugo award. The most highly acclaimed out of all of Liu Cixins novels, The Three Body Problem is a science fiction novel that is the first of a trilogy known as. The second volume of his Three Body trilogy, The Dark Forest, made a number of year-end best-of lists in 2008, and his work has been critiqued in literary journals such as Book City and Fiction World. Liu’s recent novels, beginning with the inclusion of Ball Lightning as part of Science Fiction World’s Nebula series, have led to increased mainstream attention to the genre. Over the past decade he has won multiple awards for his fiction and has become China's most popular domestic science fiction author. Serving as a very loose prequel to The Three Body Problem, Ball Lightning has a far smaller scope: Here, Liu’s focus is almost entirely on Chen, an awkward, obsessive researcher who, at age 14. Especially if you’re planning to read the entire trilogy, I think you’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of reading it in order than out of order.

An engineer by trade, Liu Cixin began writing science fiction in the early 1990s and published his first short story in 1999. I definitely recommend reading three body problem first, it sets up a lot of the premises/backstory for the overall plot of the trilogy.

Ball lightning three body problem