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| Picture by Antony Oudut |
Author bio:
David Wingrove is the Hugo Award-winning co-author (with Brian Aldiss) of The Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. He is also the co-author of the first three MYST books - novelizations of one of the world's bestselling computer games. He lives in north London with his wife and four daughters.
Hi David, welcome to my book blog, The Book Plank and thank you for taking your time to answer these few questions about your writing.
First off, can you tell the readers a bit more about yourself? How did you become an author? What do you like to do in your spare time?
I loved reading as a child. I was a regular book worm. G. A. Henty’s childrens’ historicals – WINNING HIS SPURS, ST. GEORGE FOR ENGLAND, THE LION OF ST MARK, THE LION OF THE NORTH and so on – were my favourites. I loved that sense of other times and places. I think reading those made me ripe for the next step – science fiction – which I discovered rather late in the day when I was just turned nineteen. I was overwhelmed by it. I bought and read Brian Aldiss’s BILLION YEAR SPREE, the history of the SF genre, and read all of the classic stuff he mentioned… and loved it. More than that, I had the notion that I could possibly write it. I mean, how hard could it be?
I had actually started writing – fiction, that is, not just reviews and articles – way back when I was thirteen, fourteen. And after discovering Tolkein’s LORD OF THE RINGS, I spent a summer designing my own fantasy world and making notes towards a gargantuan novel set in that world. The maps (and the first chapter) still exist. But I got tired with it, and, with the discovery of SF, turned my attention to that genre. Brimming with confidence, I began work on an SF trilogy about an alien who has crash landed on the far side of the moon. I hand wrote it in pencil – yes, and it still exists, though I haven’t looked at it for years. I didn’t bother showing anyone. You didn’t have to tell me. I knew how bad it was. I was also, at the same time – in parallel – writing short story after short story. Dozens of the damn things. And whilst some of the ideas were good, the standard of writing was abysmal. Becoming a science fiction writer seemed at times to be an unattainable goal.
Oh, and I ought, I suppose, to mention that part of the problem was to do with time. There were girlfriends, and there were books to read and there was… football.
I grew up on the south bank of the Thames, looking across from where I lived in North Battersea to Lotts Road power station and, beyond it, Stamford Bridge, where Chelsea played. On weekday evenings when they were playing you could see the floodlights from our living room window. Between 1961, when I was six, and the early nineteen seventies, I saw almost every home game played at the ground, and I suppose you could have called me a fan of sorts, but my first real passion for a team was for another London club, Queens Park Rangers, and I fell in love with the skills of one particular player, Rodney Marsh, a cavalier spirit if there ever was one. For a time I lived a bigamist’s life, seeing one team one week, the other the next. This went on throughout 1967, ’68 and ’69, and I saw QPR rise from the depths of the Third Division, into the First in straight seasons, winning their only ever trophy on the way. Exciting times. And then I moved, and the pull on me to go and see Chelsea diminished. Oh, and I loved to play, too, as often as I could. There was no way I could ever have made a career out of it, but I loved the physicality of the game. To my mind there’s not a single sport that touches it.
And one other thing. Something that infuses my work and that I’ve commented upon before now when I’ve talked of the influences on Chung Kuo. Music. And rock music in particular.
It began with the Beatles and the Beach Boys, my sister Rose and I saving up to buy each single, each album as they came out. Classic stuff. And then came psychodelia, and rock, and finally progressive rock, that wonderful sub-genre that seems to have totally vanished from the airwaves these past twenty years. What attracted me to it? The grandeur of it, I guess. The pomp. The sense of evolutionary progression that fuelled it. At its best, for me, there’s nothing better. Back then, I couldn’t wait for each new album by the bands I followed – Yes, Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Soft Machine and others. Yes, and forty years on I’m writing a book on the subject.
Which kind of comes full circle, because I guess I finally became an author by default, despite all of the different calls on my time. I became a critic, writing and reviewing and editing, and got my name in print that way, long before my first professional piece of fiction – CHUNG KUO – got taken up.
What inspired you to write the Chung Kuo series?
Pure chance, if I’m honest. I needed a backdrop to a short story I was writing and picked upon a topic I had studied back in sixth form days – the Opium Wars. I’d been fascinated by China for a long time and what with Deng Shao Ping giving the peasants the right to sell any surplus produce in 1979, I pushed that idea – of a freer commercial China – to the limit. They were the biggest nation, on the planet, after all, and if they really put their minds to it… Well, and so it’s proved. Thirty years on and they’re set, before Obama leaves office, to oust the USA and become the leading economic power.
You chose China to be the force for global domination. Had you also considered other continents like Russia or the USA? Why did you choose China?
I know there are a lot of rich Russians about these days, but the way I saw it was that, given the chance the Chinese would grasp the opportunity and run with it, whereas the Russians… No, I couldn’t see it. And the way the old Soviet Union fell apart after the fall of the Wall convinced me that they would never, ever rule the world.
And the USA? Well, they partly ran it already, so where’s the novelty in that? No. It had to be China. All of that colour. That ages-long tradition, that pure, alien exoticism. And the more I read up on the subject, the stranger it grew. I was seduced by it, you might say. And after a while the husk of my original idea fell away and the story became CHUNG KUO, became “The Middle Kingdom”.
What was the biggest challenge for you in writing this series?
Keeping tabs and making the thing consistent, which I achieved through having files on everything – characters especially. I also spent a long time researching ‘Things Chinese’, to make sure I got things right and to get into the Chinese mind set (which I’ve been told I have). Oh, and ending it… but we’ll come to that.
To be serious about this, however, I bought a wall-full of books on ‘Things Chinese’ to try and give the work its oriental flavour. To get the big facts and the small details right. I read THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF CHINA and stole outrageously from it. Much of CHUNG KUO works so well because I took the care to research it in fine detail. Yes, and much of what seems science fictional invention is just transposition of those things Chinese.
The Chung Kuo series was originally released in 1989. Starting in 2011 the Chung Kuo re-cast has been released. What was the main reason behind breathing new life into the series?
One, because I wanted to bridge the fictional history of the world between the now in which we live and the future that is Chung Kuo, and try and demonstrate by that means just how it might come about. The two prequels achieve that, I hope.
Two, because – for various reasons – the ending of the original series sucks. And I wanted to get it right.
And three, because it would give me the opportunity of giving the thing one final, satisfying polish. Not to speak of wanting to draw people’s attention to a work which, surely, had finally come into its own. Thirty years ago, people laughed at the notion that China might dominate. Now?
Which parts of the overall story weren’t you pleased with?
The ending. Why? Because I was forced into cramming two books into one, and because I did a hurried job owing to the fact that I wasn’t being paid a bean to do it! Ironically, it was probably the most science fictional part of the whole sequence, only what with the first seven-eighths of CHUNG KUO having an epic historical feel to it, it didn’t quite gel with the rest. My scheme to turn the final two books of the original series into six very different books, with a number of big new plotlines, ought to do the trick. I’ve started working on those big story lines, the working titles for which are “Father Of Lies”, “Endgame”, “On Freedom’s Shore”, “In The Spider Garden”, “Incremental Evolution”, “Whiteness”, and “Last Quarters”. As things go, I’ve about 18 months to complete these, if we’re to keep to schedule. The one I’ve done most work on – which will be the major part of Book Nineteen, THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE – is “Whiteness”, which, as it stands, is 110,000 words, with two final chapters to be written.
After the recast series was confirmed, how did you go about rewriting parts of such an epic-scaled story?
A large part of the recasting involved me re-reading the sequence (twice) over what was a five year period, and doing a very tight edit (cutting everything that didn’t work or that read inelegantly) before working out what was needed at both ends – the prequels and the end game. When my editor, Nic Cheetham was finally ready to put the opening volumes out, I already had the first 14 volumes prepared, in a form he could use. Of the final six, books 15 and 16 won’t be changed in any major way, though they will have a few small plotlines that are brand spanking new. You might see these as a way of tying the storylines in convincingly. But from Book 17 onward it’s mainly new material, and where there is old material, it’ll be added to and changed.
Next to rewriting parts of the series, you also wrote two new prequels. What was your motivation to write SON OF HEAVEN and DAYLIGHT ON IRON MOUNTAIN? And do you think that gives the re-cast series a greater justification?
I hope so. But the truth is that I felt compelled to write those volumes. They were originally one mega-volume, but we cut 70,000 words of material and then cut it in two. I found it easy to write the opener, but DAYLIGHT caused me all manner of technical problems. More than SON OF HEAVEN, it’s the transitional volume. Most future histories duck the issue – they never show how you got from here to there, but that’s what I wanted to do. To demonstrate how it might have happened.
How do you now feel about how the recast series is playing out so far? Are there still parts that you would like to rewrite?
Yes. I would write the Reeds (whose story is so important to the two prequels) into the main epic sequence, for a start. As it is, I shall probably write a series of stories, to be published separately from the sequence, that covers this – one long story to each generation of Reeds. I‘d also make small changes to Kim and Ben. And I mean small, as in subtle. But a lot of things I originally omitted, will be developed over the next few years as short (and long) stories that don’t have to be tied in to the main epic except for the fact that they will share Chung Kuo’s backdrop. They’ll view the bigger story on TV screens, and through rumour and remembrance of events. They won’t be part of those backdrop events, if you see what I mean. I’ve already written twelve of those stories, two of which are available on the Chung Kuo fan site, OF GIFTS AND STONES. There’ll be forty or more eventually, some of which will be full length novels. But all of these will take place outside of the main epic sequence.
Did you encounter any specific problems while rewriting the series? Or even writing the original series?
Stylistic ticks, mainly. Re-reading, I noted that I had quite a few bad writerly habits, and I got rid of all of those, which makes it a lot better read. In doing so I probably cut about five per cent of the original material. Beside that? Not many problems, as I had a set of very good editors first time round who – in the first three/four books - caught most of the inconsistencies and those moments where your characters aren’t quite consistently themselves. What problems I did have were mainly at the end, and partly that was to do with the fact that in the ten years of its production, I had several changes of editors, which never helps.
In the two prequel novels, you show both how the Chinese take over on a small scale – focusing on the characters - and on a much larger global scale when China takes over whole continents. Why did you decide not to show the global in fine details?
The thing is, you can’t show everything, and you constantly have to make decisions as to what you leave out. In the whole sequence, for instance, I chose not to focus on South America or Australasia. I think there’s one scene in the whole thing set in South America, and none at all in Australasia. I don’t think this made the epic any weaker. In fact, quite the opposite. But in the short stories I’m writing which run parallel to the re-cast epic sequence, you’ll see these things. The left out things. I hadn’t read Robert Jordan’s WHEEL OF TIME until after I’d long finished my own, but I think he puts too much into the mix. I think it weakens the fiction to try and show EVERYTHING. You have to be selective. One mistake I did make, however, was in leaving out Li Yuan’s final campaign against the Americans, but that’ll be in there in the new book 19, the second half, “Freedom’s Shore” (a title influenced, incidentally, by The Doors’ track, “Waiting For The Sun”)
THE MIDDLE KINGDOM jumps 100 years into the future. Why did you choose to make such a large jump?
This was where the original began, “In the days before the world began” (that world being Eridani, and not Earth, as it turns out). I made the decision to leave a gap between the two new prequels and this, because, I think, you get into that future world very quickly, knowing – because of DAYLIGHT – what the history of this place is and where it comes from.
And the truth is, I didn’t want to tinker with the story lines. They worked, so I left them alone. And if the first two novels FEEL different, that’s okay, because they tell of a world that WAS different. As for the size of the jump, when you think about it, most science fiction novels make such a leap, and it’s usually at least 25-50 years and, more often, a good hundred or more. Philip K Dick, writing in the fifties and sixties, set his tales in the eighties and nineties, or in the early 21st century. They’re now effectively set in our past. So by means of that 100 years, I meant to give the books a slightly longer shelf life, I guess.
Are you still busy editing the books to come? And do you have any other projects apart from Chung Kuo recast?
I am. Book Nine, MONSTERS OF THE DEEP, was returned to my editor, complete with new appendices, only two weeks ago. As for other projects, watch this space. I spent 2001 to 2005 writing a big time travel novel, ROADS TO MOSCOW. It’s a half million word trilogy, two-thirds of which is done. More than that I can’t say… except that it’s set over three thousand years and involves a time war between Russia and Germany, as well as being a love story… Time-crossed lovers and all that.
Can you tell us a bit about what we can expect further along in the series?
I don’t want to spoil things, only to say that as it goes on the sequence has as many twists and turns and shock events as any George RR Martin novel. And, as each book progresses, you learn more and more about the world of Chung Kuo, travelling out further and further from the Earth. Things change, and our characters with them. More I’m loath to say.
Lastly, if you would have to recommend five books as must reads, which would they be?
In science fiction – Tim Powers’s wonderful THE ANUBIS GATES, Ursula LeGuin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, Brian Aldiss’s HELLICONIA trilogy, Frank Herbert’s DUNE (and DUNE MESSIAH) and George RR Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, which I know is fantasy, but.
In mainstream fiction? D H Lawrence’s THE RAINBOW, Emile Zola’s, LA TERRE, John Fowles’s DANIEL MARTIN, Hilary Mantel’s WOLF HALL, and Hermann Hesse’s THE GLASS BEAD GAME. A mixed bag, but all worth reading and re-reading.
Oh, and as for football, these days, for the last eighteen years I’ve lived in Highbury with my Arsenal supporter wife, whose family are all fanatical gooners (fans of Arsenal). It took them a while, but I have been converted to the faith and these days wear the red rather than the blue. Some see this as a worse betrayal than cheating on your wife, but the sweet football that the Arsenal play – the sublime nature of their game – has given me a thick skin against criticisms by “true fans” who say I should have stayed with QPR, whatever the consequences, and despite them becoming a crap team.
So there we have it. I guess that I’m a very blokey bloke. I’m passionately anti-vegetarian, love a pint or two of Fuller’s ESB, will watch endless footie, and, a lot of the time, can be found listening to hard rock on my i-pod. All in all a bit of a barbarian. Except for when I sit down at my desk and let the visions come.
Thanks again for your time, David, and I wish you all the best in editing the last few books in the Chung Kuo sequence and in all your other future endeavours.
ENDS
David Wingrove Monday 8th July 2013