A new publisher is attempting to acquire British science fiction writer David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo masterpiece, with the intent of splitting it into 19 volumes and re-writing the unpopular ending.

“We are in the process of acquiring world rights for the Chung Kuo series with a view to publishing a ‘director’s cut’ set of editions, but the deal isn’t signed yet. Hopefully, in the next week or two, it will be,” a spokesperson for the Corvus division of UK publisher Atlantic Books (Grove Atlantic) told Keeping the Door by email this week.

“Everything going to plan,” they continued, “we want to recast the series into 19 volumes, beginning with an entirely new prequel, Son of Heaven, in late 2010 and finishing with a completely re-written ending, sometime in 2014.”

The critically acclaimed series — as grand in scale as Frank Herbert’s Dune or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time – has suffered a problematic publishing history. The final book — The Marriage of the Living Dark — is not broadly available in Australia, for example, and is only available online at premium prices. The series is believed to be out of print.

Fellow UK-based published Quercus had previously bought world rights (excluding France) to Chung Kuo, and had also planned to publish the series in nineteen volumes with a new prequel and a new final volume. According to a statement on the publisher’s site, Quercus was planning to re-launch the series in May 2009, with all of the books to be made available by the end of 2012.

However, the re-launch never happened.

According to the website of Bob Newell, which is pretty much the only authoritative source on what David Wingrove is up to at the moment, Wingrove delivered the cited prequel, When China Comes, to Quercus.

“It’s a 250,000 word five-parter, covering 2047 to 2098, complete with stock market crashes,” Wingrove reportedly wrote.

The author also said he’d begun work on another book, Dawn in Stone City, “a new kind of Chung Kuo novel, based on a single character Ma Ji (Maggie) and set in 2210.”

Commentary
If there is one science fiction series that is desperately crying out to be re-published right now, and that would be guaranteed to sell well if it was re-issued by a major publisher, it’s David Wingrove’s masterful Chung Kuo series.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I consider this author to be one of science fiction’s greatest living masters, and it’s an absolute crime that not only is his greatest work not widely available, but that he’s written at least one book succeeding that work that has not yet been published. I don’t know what happened with Quercus or what exactly Atlantic is planning, but they had better get their collective asses into gear on this one. AT ONCE.

David Wingrove

Like David Zindell‘s A Requiem for Homo Sapiens series, Wingrove’s Chung Kuo was never given the public recognition it so truly deserved, despite being an absolute science fiction masterpiece of the sort of vision that only authors like Frank Herbert can claim to match.

Ironically, Wingrove is often known more by science fiction fans for his work on the Myst books based on one of the best selling (and also critically acclaimed) computer games of all time. However I think it’s safe to say those books pale before Chung Kuo.

For those that don’t know it, Chung Kuo is the epic tale of a future Earth which has been covered coast to coast by one single city; a city dominated by Chinese (Han) culture. The seven emperors of the world, the T’ang, are primarily concerned with keeping things as they have always been; stable, peaceful, controlled.

It’s the ultimate, perfect vision of a unified world; a utopia where any man can rise up through the many level of society and all needs are met. But of course, things aren’t perfect in the world of Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom. For human beings must grow and change; it is in their nature to do so. And so Wingrove’s epic series is necessarily a story of conflict on a vast scale, possibly on a vaster scale than any science fiction writer before him has been able to imagine. Conflict on a scale of 36 billion people.

If you haven’t read Chung Kuo yet, I implore you to.