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David Wingrove
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Chung Kuo 1: The Middle Kingdom: Bk. 1 Paperback – 2 Sept. 1993

by David Wingrove (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 9 ratings
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The author's first novel, also known as "A Spring day at the Edge of the World", David Wingrove was also the co-writer of "Trillion Year Spree: the History of Science Fiction", a reference book written with Brian Aldiss.
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  1. Print length
    736 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Hodder Paperbacks
  4. Publication date
    2 Sept. 1993
  5. Dimensions
    11.1 x 17.9 x 3.9 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    0450516105
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0450516108
  8. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

David Wingrove is the author of the magnificent eight volume Chung Kuo series. He is also the author of Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction which he co-wrote with Brian Aldiss. It won the prestigious Hugo and Locus awards. David Wingrove lives in North London with his wife and four daughters.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hodder Paperbacks; New edition (2 Sept. 1993)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0450516105
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0450516108
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11.1 x 17.9 x 3.9 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

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David Wingrove

David Wingrove

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4 out of 5 stars
9 global ratings

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Rik Morley
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 December 2014
    Verified Purchase
    A must read !
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  • S. J. King
    2.0 out of 5 stars Lumbering and cruel
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 June 2015
    Verified Purchase
    I am a Sinophile, so SF written from a Chinese perspective is an idea that interests me. Unfortunately this is not the book I was hoping to find. There are too many clichés - the corrupt official, the favoured child of a powerful family who gets away with murder - and there are some carefully described torture scenes which I just found nasty. One of the main characters in Frank Herbert's "Dune", Piter de Vries, is a professional torturer, and a very frightening character - but we never get to see him practise his arts "on screen". Wingrove, I'm afraid, lacks the subtlety to scare us with horrors without spelling them out. I gave the book away to the British Heart Foundation and will not proceed with book 2.
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  • Rosscowhoohaa
    5.0 out of 5 stars A hell of a series!
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 October 2018
    Epic...intriguing...violent...dangerous...

    A hell of a series!
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  • Printul Noptilor
    1.0 out of 5 stars So what have the Chinese got to do with this?
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 July 2010
    The idea of the book is, as such, very interesting: the Chinese civilization rules the world, while the whites are just a minority. (They are called Hungmao and their upper class lives in Chinese style houses.)
    Unfortunately, this idea is badly implemented. The book is overstuffed with other overly fantastic ideas (like the whole world being just one big city), so that the main idea - to describe the consequences of the dominance of the Chinese way of thinking for the world - is overshadowed.
    Sure enough, when you want to have a bunch of bizarre creatures in your novel, you can as well make them Chinese (or Babylonians, Martians, Cthulhu, whatever), because an average American doesn't know hardly anything about the Chinese anyway. But there are some who do and they will expect a certain level of expertise and intelligence from the author. This book, though, is simplistic low-quality entertainment. The author totally fails to provide an insight into the Chinese way of thinking and create a realistic scenario of it's interaction with the European one.
    This book contains carefully selected details that have no artistic value but are obviously chosen with the sole purpose of shocking the politically correct American reader. (Example: a female slave on the first pages; by the way, it turns out she's an android - we don't want to be THAT daring, do we?) And that's pretty much all that is happening in the book. The plot is just boring.
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  • Seamus Scanlon
    5.0 out of 5 stars An very interesting alternate history
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 March 2009
    A very good book with great characters in a very interesting world ruled by the 7 chinese emperors set 200 years in the future.A must read for scifi and alternate history fans.
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  • Blackhorse47
    5.0 out of 5 stars A rare sf epic that justifies its length
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 November 2009
    The Chinese nation spreads to control earth. Then they rewrite history, ensuring future generations will remain unaware that there was a time when they weren't in control. By the 23rd century, tens of billions of downtrodden humans live in vast cities that cover the planet. Every person is ruled by the repressive super-nation. Rebellion is pointless and is always ruthlessly crushed. But the seeds of change are growing, in small ways with petty personal squabbles and in large global political changes brought on by complacency. This civilisation will crumble, but will the new life be better or worse?

    This series is worth reading, but there are caveats. It's around 5000 pages long over eight books and was conceived as one epic story so that reading an individual volume won't provide a self-contained story. But although the scope of the tale justifies its length, it could easily have been shorter. Numerous sub-plots add only complexity rather than essential story threads. You usually know there's the potential for confusion when novels have appendices for the cast list. The saga presents two styles of story telling. Sometimes large sections are devoted to one story line. This works best, although it means that hundreds of pages pass before other plot lines return by which time you've forgotten what was happening in them. The other style is to run everything together with the story flitting from one plot strand to the next every few pages. With there being several dozen plot lines, this can be tiring.

    What makes this story worthwhile is its effective playing out of two scales of story. There's the epic world-wide tales and the smaller character-based tales, but the book shows how each affect the other. Characters do the right things in a selfless manner while others do the wrong things for personal gain. Whichever way is chosen, every action has a consequence that leads to a real sense of history being created that in turn affects people's lives. Pleasantly, Wingrove has no qualms about killing off characters, and not just the one-dimensional ones who might as well have deadmeat tattooed on their foreheads. It's hard to work out who will survive and who won't, and although a lack of a central voice is usually to a novel's detriment, here it adds a sense of danger where you're always guessing where the story will go.

    Aside from its excessive length, what ultimately becomes the main fault is the poor handling of SF themes. For vast sections there is little that you expect in SF, which is fine, but I feel that concerned the author and so in later volumes more SF ideas are introduced. This reduces the quality of the story and it finally unravels to surge off in a bizarre direction to the extent I'd recommend only reading to volume 7 and ignoring the unneeded final volume. Those caveats aside this is a worthwhile saga and a supreme accomplishment that deserves to be more widely appreciated.
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  • Martin
    5.0 out of 5 stars Tolle Serie
    Reviewed in Germany on 21 November 2024
    Verified Purchase
    Ich habe die Middle Kingdom-Reihe (Bk. 1) von David Windgrove schon vor etlichen Jahren in England gelesen – das ist wirklich schon eine lange Zeit her. Leider musste ich die Bücher wegwerfen, als ich nach Deutschland gezogen bin, aber immer wieder musste ich an sie denken und wollte sie gerne nochmal lesen. Das Problem war nur, dass mir der Titel einfach nicht mehr eingefallen ist. Jetzt bin ich endlich wieder zufällig darauf gestoßen!

    Ich hätte das Buch gern auf Deutsch gehabt, aber eine deutsche Übersetzung hab ich leider nicht gefunden. Also habe ich mir das erste Buch nun doch wieder auf Englisch gekauft.

    Mittlerweile fällt es mir jedoch schwerer, die Ruhe zum Lesen zu finden, wie früher, als ich noch viel und in einem Rutsch gelesen habe. Jetzt denke ich oft, dass ich die Serie eigentlich lieber als Hörbuch hätte, weil ich irgendwie einfach nicht mehr dazu komme, selbst zu lesen. Aber naja, ich bin ja auf dem besten Weg zur Rente – dann werde ich hoffentlich viel mehr Zeit haben, um wieder in Ruhe Bücher zu lesen!.

    hier noch ein kurzer Überblick zur Geschichte

    Middle Kingdom ist der Auftakt zu einer epischen Science-Fiction-Reihe, die in einer Zukunft spielt, in der die Erde von einer autoritären, zentralisierten Regierung kontrolliert wird. Der „Mittlere Königreich“-Staat regiert die Welt mit eiserner Hand, wobei die Gesellschaft stark hierarchisch und von strengen Regeln geprägt ist. Der Protagonist, einem einfachen Bürger, wird in ein politisches und gesellschaftliches System hineingezogen, das von Geheimnissen, Intrigen und Machtkämpfen durchzogen ist. Im Zentrum steht der Kampf um Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit in einer Welt, die von Überwachung und Kontrolle dominiert wird. Die Geschichte entfaltet sich mit viel Spannung und führt die Charaktere durch eine düstere, technologische Zukunft.
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