Cixin Liu Collection 3 Books Set (The Supernova Era, Hold Up the Sky and Ball Lightning)

This three-book collection brings together science fiction by Cixin Liu: The Supernova Era, Hold Up the Sky and Ball Lightning. Across the set, the stories range from near-future crisis to far-reaching speculation, moving between Earth-bound settings and vast cosmic timescales.

In these works, Liu imagines a supernova’s delayed impact on Earth, a sequence of scenarios spanning communities, technologies and distant futures, and a personal quest to understand a rare and devastating natural phenomenon. Each title approaches big scientific ideas through distinct premises, from global survival to experimental physics and the limits of the universe.

Included titles

• The Supernova Era
• Hold Up the Sky
• Ball Lightning

Key details

• Three-book set
• Author: Cixin Liu
• Includes The Supernova Era, Hold Up the Sky and Ball Lightning

Synopses

The Supernova Era

Eight years after a supermassive star dies eight light years away, a wave of high-energy radiation is set to reach Earth. As the skies brighten with a new star, the effects will be catastrophic: within a year, everyone over the age of thirteen will die due to irreversible chromosomal damage. With time running out, parents begin preparing their children to inherit the knowledge needed to keep the world functioning.

Hold Up the Sky

This collection travels across time and space, from a rural mountain community where elementary students use physics to stop an alien invasion to coal mines in northern China where a new technology could save lives or ignite a fire that burns for centuries. Other scenarios include a world where superstring computers predict human behaviour, a future 10,000 years ahead in which humanity can begin again, and events reaching to the collapse of the universe.

Ball Lightning

On his fourteenth birthday, Chen witnesses his parents killed by a blast of ball lightning. Determined to understand what happened, he devotes his life to uncovering the secrets of the phenomenon. His search takes him from storm-chasing in the mountains to highly classified underground laboratories, as he gradually reveals a new frontier in particle physics.