David Wingrove Books In Order

Publication Order of Chung Kuo Books

Publication Order of Chung Kuo Recasting Books

Publication Order of Myst Books

Publication Order of Roads to Moscow Books

Publication Order of David Wingrove Non Fiction Books

Born in North Battersea (London) in September 1954, David Wingrove spent his formative years playing among the bomb-sites of World War Two, and coming to know the insides of deserted houses and the smells of brick-dust and damp wallpaper every bit as well as Proust knew his soggy biscuits.

A local C of E primary school – St Mary’s, now converted to expensive flats! – disgorged him into the tender mercies of a less local Grammar School, where he spent his teenage years mainly in the art block listening to early Floyd, Hendrix and anything LOUD.

Academically he did well enough, but – mistakenly – decided to enter the world of Banking. A Diploma in Banking quickly followed, but not before he got the SF bug in his eighteenth year. He read Asimov and Heinlein and thought he could do better than both. Then he read Delany, Silverberg, Aldiss, LeGuin and Zelazny and questioned that assumption. But he was hooked.

In the decade that followed (1972-82) he wrote a total of over 300 unpublished short stories and fifteen novels – including unpublished classics like Observing Dead Flies, Apart(a trilogy), The Dark Ages and As We Began, And Then Sweet Monday, King Of Pain and The Perpetual Boy. Very few of these were ever submitted after the first few years but were seen as lessons to be learned. All of them still exist in files in two small grey filing cabinets.

Seven years in banking was about all he could take. He quit the day before his twenty fifth birthday (in 1979), encouraged by his then partner, Susan Oudot, and went to the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he proceeded to read English and American Lit. Three years later he got a First with Honours. A Masters followed, and then three years researching a doctorate on Lawrence, Hardy and Golding. This had ballooned to a fulsome 800-pages when he quit working on it to pursue a new fictional project, then called A Perfect Art. Between 1984 and 1988, when it was submitted, the work changed title twice, becoming first A Spring Day at the Edge of the World and thenChung Kuo, under which title it was sold (eventually to 18 publishers throughout the world) in the Autumn (Fall) of 1988, the first volume, The Middle Kingdom, appearing in 1989.

Between 1989 and 1999, David Wingrove released eight volumes in his critically-acclaimed Chung Kuo series. This sequence is set two centuries in the future and depicts a world of 35 billion people ruled by the Chinese, who have come to dominate the world and built vast, continent-spanning cities consisting of hundreds of levels. Real history has been erased, particularly the achievements of the West, and a stratified, rigidly hierarchal society has come into being, enforced by the police and military. The books chronicle the fractures appearing in this society, eventually leading to war.

The series was originally envisaged as a nine-book series, but the publishers dropped the final book, forcing Wingrove to hurriedly to rewrite the eighth book to conclude the series in a manner that did not satisfy himself or his fans. The publishers did minimal publicity for the final book and it quickly disappeared from view, followed by the rest of the series.

However, the Chung Kuo series has now arisen, phoenix-like, from the dead. Corvus-Atlantic have picked up the series and will be reissuing it starting in September 2010. The series has been comprehensively re-edited and re-structured by the author, with five new novels’ worth of material added to the saga. These take the form of a completely new prequel novel depicting the rise of China, named Son of Heaven, and a hugely expanded and revised concluding section, restoring the author’s original intentions for the series. Over half a million words of new material was written for the new editions. In addition, the existing large books have been broken down into smaller, more economical volumes so that the entire series now spans a mind-boggling nineteen books of around 120,000-200,000 words apiece, somewhere well north of 2 million words and maybe closer to 3 (to put this another way, the 11 Jordan-authored Wheel of Time books come to about 3 million words).

A prequel to the Chung Kuo series, called When China Comes, was released in May 2009 by Quercus Publishing, which also re-released the entire series: “The series has been recast in nineteen volumes, including a new prequel and a new final volume. After a series launch in May 2009, Quercus will embark on an ambitious publishing programme that will see all nineteen volumes available by the end of 2012.”

There is also a film script, Empire of Ice, co-written with an American friend, John Kavanagh, and there are plans for two further novels, a prequel, When China Comes, and a first person character novel, Dawn in Stone City, as well as a number of connected short stories.
Since 1995, Wingrove has also been the co-writer of theMyst books, connected to the world’s best-selling CD-Rom games. Three novels currently exist in this sequence, with more to come.

On the personal side, David Wingrove is still with his partner, Susan Oudot, and between them they have produced four daughters: Jessica (14), Amelia (12), Georgia (9) and Francesca (4). They married in July 1992. Susan is the best- selling author of Real Women, All That I Am and Virtual Love, all of which have been or are being televised.

David Wingrove currently lives with his family in Islington, North London, where they have been struggling to renovate an old and rambling early Victorian mansion. His passion for Queens Park Rangers football team was somewhat diminished by recent years’ results, but is still close to fanatical. He is currently working on three very different novels, The Beast with Two Backs, Heaven’s Bright Sun, and Roads to Moscow. There is also the small matter of a TV project, The Portal, which may or may not get made.