The Book Plank

Daylight on Iron Mountain by David Wingrove, Chung Kuo Recast #2. It is 2087. Japan lies under a radioactive cloud, its denizens wiped out. America has been subjugated, its inhabitants scattered. The Old World is dead, buried beneath the new foundations of the New – Chung Kuo, a mile-high, globe spanning megacity. Billions have perished and history has been rewritten with their blood. Over all of this one man reigns supreme: Tsao Ch’un – the Son of Heaven. But it takes one type of man to conquer a world, another to rule it. The Son of Heaven’s brutality has alienated even his closest general and in the depths of the grat city, rebellion has been unleashed. The Great Wheel of Change turns. The fight for the future has only just begun. Daylight on Iron Mountain is the second book and second prologue to the revised Chung Kuo series. The original series began with The Middle Kingdom, which is up next in the Chung Kuo Recast. I was thinking about why a series would need...

Son of Heaven by David Wingrove Chung Kuo Recast #1 The year is 2065, two decades after the great economic collapse that destroyed civilization. With its power broken and its cities ruined, life in the West continues in scattered communities. In rural Dorset, Jake Reed lives with his 14-year-old son and memories of the great collapse. Back in ’43, Jakes was a rich, young futures broker immersed in the datscape of the world’s financial markets. He saw what was coming – and who was behind it. Forewarned, he was one of the few to escape the fall For 22 years Jake has lived in fear of the future, and finally it is coming – quite literally – across the plain towards him. Chinese airships are in the skies and a strange glacial structure dominates the horizon. Under the rule of the mighty Tsao Ch’un, a resurgent Chine is seeking to abolish the past and bring about world peace through rigidly enforced order. But a civil war looms and Jake will find himself at the hear of the struggle for...