When Chung Kuo opens, the world has been split into seven areas, each ruled by its own T'ang, and together the T'angs form The Seven, the ruling council of the planet. They are benevolent dictators for the most part, and their core belief is a principled resistance to change, thanks to their belief that an obsession with change for the sake of change was responsible for the eventual destruction of the West. In this, they are opposed by a group called the Dispersionists, who are generally European and who feel that society has been stifled by the rule of The Seven.

The entire eight-part series is nearly 5,000 pages long (I counted), and it paints a detailed and vivid picture of the world that Wingrove has created. Is it worth it? Is anything worth 5,000 pages? We'll see....

Volume I: Chung Kuo - The Middle Kingdom (August 3, 1997)

Volume I is, basically, just an introduction. Chung Kuo has an incredibly vast cast of characters, and most of them are introduced in the first few hundred pages of this volume. It is a testament to Wingrove's narrative skills that, despite the fact that there are dozens of characters and many of them have tongue-twisting Chinese names, they are introduced so smoothly that you rarely feel any confusion about who's who or what's going on.

The world of Chung Kuo is richly drawn. Most of the action in Volume I takes place in City Europe, a collection of individual stacks that cover the old continent of Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The richer you are, the higher up you live, and the ruling class all live on Level 1 at the very top of the city. The bottom level, called the Net, is home to the poorest of Chung Kuo's workers, and below that are ten more levels ("below the Net") that form a sort of Botany Bay for the cities. Finally, below even that, is the Clay, a savage place in which society has completely broken down and both language and any semblance of civilization have been completely lost. Chung Kuo puts all of this to good use and includes major characters all the way from the T'ang of City Europe to a "Clayborn" boy named Kim.

For the most part, the rebels are presented as the bad guys and The Seven are the good guys, an unusual point of view for a science fiction novel since The Seven are opposed to change and maintain a rigorous control over scientific development via the Edict of Technological Control. I'm not sure how this is going to play out in the remaining volumes.

So far, Chung Kuo is a great read, and it's a mystery to me why it's never shown up even as a nominee for either the Hugo or the Nebula. It's a natural for either one, and it's also clear that it's been highly promoted by its publisher and has garnered rave reviews all over the place. I checked the Web to see if I could find out anything about this, but nothing popped up.

Volume II: The Broken Wheel (August 11, 1997)

Events are moving apace. The Broken Wheel begins five years after the end of Chung Kuo and The Seven have waged a long but eventually successful war against the Dispersionists. At least, they think they've won. In reality, it's one of those messy rebellions that just keeps on festering, and it's masterminded by an extraordinarily single-minded baddie with access to truly unbelievable resources and an (unexplained) hatred for The Seven that just won't quit. You can just hardly wait for him to get his well deserved comeuppance.

The entire series is written in a style that I normally don't like much, where the action switches from place to place repeatedly, never staying with any one character for more than a few pages. Given the vast scope of the story, however, and the equally vast cast of characters, there's probably no choice. What's more, Wingrove is clever enough to pull this off without being annoying. His prose is straightforward and readable, his characters are developing slowly and complexly (is that a word?), and the story so far is a treat to read.

Volume III: The White Mountain (August 21, 1997)

I think that I've finally gotten past the introduction to this series, which appears to basically take up the first two and a half volumes. All the major characters have been introduced (at least, I think they have...) and the arc of the story is now becoming clear.

Without giving away the plot it turns out that it's hard to actually review each volume of this series in real time, so these reviews are probably going to start getting pretty short until I get to the last volume. However, my overall take so far is that Chung Kuo is well worth reading, but, yes, it sure is long. Only time will tell if the entire series deserves its lofty length.

Volume IV: The Stone Within (September 5, 1997)

Things are starting to move a little slowly. Previous plot elements are being developed, but nothing really new is introduced in this volume. Li Yuan, the young T'ang of City Europe, is slowly gaining more and more authority, and the battle lines between him and the T'ang of Africa are becoming pretty clearly drawn.

However, I'm afraid I'm beginning to form an answer to the question, "Is it worth 5,000 pages?" There's an awful lot of fat in this story and I think it could have used a really good editor to sweat it down to size. Reading it more slowly probably wouldn't help either: the story is so unbelievably complex that if you put it down for a couple of months you'd probably be hopelessly confused when you picked it back up.

Back into the breech....

Volume V: Beneath the Tree of Heaven

Volume VI: White Moon, Red Dragon

Volume VII: Days of Bitter Strength

Volume VIII: The Marriage of the Living Dark

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