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. 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. Between 19, 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.īetween 19, David Wingrove released eight volumes in his critically-acclaimed Chung Kuo series. 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. A Masters followed, and then three years researching a doctorate on Lawrence, Hardy and Golding.
Three years later he got a First with Honours. 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. Seven years in banking was about all he could take. All of them still exist in files in two small grey filing cabinets. Very few of these were ever submitted after the first few years but were seen as lessons to be learned. In the decade that followed (1972-82) he wrote a total of over 300 unpublished short stories and fifteen novels – including unpublished classics like Observing Dead Flies, Apart(a trilogy), The Dark Ages and As We Began, And Then Sweet Monday, King Of Pain and The Perpetual Boy. Then he read Delany, Silverberg, Aldiss, LeGuin and Zelazny and questioned that assumption. He read Asimov and Heinlein and thought he could do better than both. A Diploma in Banking quickly followed, but not before he got the SF bug in his eighteenth year. 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.Ī 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.Īcademically he did well enough, but – mistakenly – decided to enter the world of Banking.
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