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If you're already familiar with David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series, you might be happy to know it's beginning again. Of course if you know the story, just skip a paragraph and hear the good news. But in case this is all new to you, let's recap: Chung Kuo was seven good books and one horrible book that followed an alternate sci-fi future where the China of tomorrow controls the globe.

At their best, the scope of the books rival Dune and the Foundation Trilogy. At their worst, the series fell victim to publisher demands which pretty much trashed Book Eight. But that's all back in the 90s, because what's important now how the author's doing something that possibly has never been done before: he's redoing the entire series from scratch, in e-book form, and making it even longer.

 

 

Come inside as Scott talks about the original eight book series and the new ongoing revision project. There's a chance Chung Kuo might be just the thing to hold you over till Game of Thrones comes back.

I first picked up the hardback of Chung Kuo for a buck, because it was huge and hey, hardback for a buck, right? I knew nothing about the book and was impressed at how quick and enjoyable it was, and how easily I followed the dozens of important characters. With the battle between dominant Chinese aristocrats and some up-and-coming minor players of European descent, the books felt like James Clavell, where maintaining the feel of epic was more important than, say, authentic historical details. And really, who's dumb enough to try and learn history from a sci-fi novel in the first place? A series like this is just for fun, and boy, is there plenty of that. The day I finished Book One, I went to the store for Books Two and Three.

Like Firefly, David Wingrove's series was cut short by executives who just didn't realize what they had. Like Game of Thrones, the books cover a complex grab for power over the known world and beyond. But I think the Chung Kuo series most approaches Frank Herbert, building a world in front of you, and then letting you watch it begin to bend under the weight of its history. You won't get the depth of Dune, but it seems fair to call Wingrove at least the equal of Dune Messiah.

 

 

And perhaps that's because Herbert hedged his bets by using future-humans so far beyond us they became mostly metaphor. Chung Kuo has no order of magic nuns or human calculators, just a planet covered by a man-made city, and mysterious leaders involved in game for control. Even though they use weapons and technology far in advance of our own, they're still basically "Future Europe" and "Future China" and that means they'll carry biases ideas like "Fremen" and "House Harkonnen" don't immediately suggest. There are also a lot of sci-fi/fantasy cliches tucked into the books, and a hero is generally going to win because he's the hero, no matter if he's up in the sunshine on top of the "ice", trapped down in "the Clay" of old Earth beneath the city, or just floating around in their cyberspace. You won't come across many big twists, just a slow steady stream of events that will carry you along from chapter to chapter, many of which are nothing but long conversations.

But, to me at least, these decisions aren't so bad at all. You don't get lots of horrible pages describing intricate details of hand-waved tomorrow tech, for example, and once you know a character, there's little chance you'll have to learn about his replacement. That might seem like a dumb reason before you start, but come back when you're on Book Five and see if you don't agree. It's also worth mentioning how the subtext of the book is the debate between the role of the individual vs the role of the nation, and in this light, a slow steady pace with occasional bursts of action seems to fit the theme.

 

 

But what actually led me to do this review was the surprising discovery that Son of Heaven existed. As I mentioned above, the Chung Kuo series was cut short, sort of against the author's wishes, and he had to wrap things up before he'd intended. The final book in the original series is still very hard to find, and those who've read a copy almost universally hate it. Maybe in response to this, Wingrove's decided to take those eight existing books and expand them to twenty, adding more to the story and cleaning up the things he was forced to make dirty.

Where the original series began with the world already conquered, Son of Heaven actually starts much earlier, telling the story of an advanced Western society just at the brink of collapse, and a single Chinese madman about to make his move. This naturally throws into question the "individual West vs collective East" themes of the earlier books, but we're one twentieth of the way into the series, so it's too early to predict if this is an accident or not. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.

A lot of the new book takes place in a little town that seems to be cliche-Ireland, and the first chapter might set off your crap detectors immediately. Believe me, as someone who grew up and out of reading Piers Anthony and TSR novels, I felt the terror myself. But push on, because those post-collapse salt-of-the-earth stereotypes really will grow on you, and it drives home the disconnect when an incredibly civilized and advanced Han force slams into their peasant lives and takes control. There are some annoying moments where Wingrove goes off on needless tangents, but each and every mistake is matched by some fabulous event that just feels vital, to both the characters and the larger story as well. The effect for longtime readers is much like finding your puppy eating your favorite shoe, then seeing him wag his tail. If you start with Son of Heaven be aware, the book you start with is not the same book you'll finish.

 

 

However, my advice is to approach this series the way you should Star Wars, and follow the original order. Start with a used copy of the original, out-of-print book and if you enjoy it, grab a few more as you can. Then when you've finished Book Seven, fall back to the new e-book and start reading them as they're published. This way you already know a bit about the world that's coming, but you also don't have to endure that corporately-mandated Book Eight.

Of course, if you want some fiction about the real Chinese people, you'll much prefer someone like Ha Jin, because Chung Kuo is to true Asia what A Song Of Ice and Fire is to true Europe: just a made up fairy tale. However if you don't have a problem splitting sci-fi and reality, and you want to enjoy the slow parabola of a future empire, Wingrove's series is like nothing else on the shelves.

Photos include Great Wall of China from Watchsmart and The Face On Mars from NASA's publicly funded Viking 1 orbiter and are used under a Creative Commons License.

How big a type geek am I? Enough to have annoyed plenty of less-interested friends and relatives with unwanted discussions of typeface minutiae, but not enough to have ever tried seriously designing it. In other words, the ideal audience for Simon Garfield's new book Just My Type.

Less a comprehensive introduction to type theory and more a collection of type lore - think Font Appreciation, not Typography 101 - this engaging, witty little volume re-awakened my own fascination with the subject by telling the historic, cultural, artistic, and psychological stories behind the letterforms all around us. Here are five things I learned during my all-too-short journey through Just My Type.

Yes, the impeccably credible Trebuchet and the much-mocked Comic Sans were both designed by Microsoft typographic engineer Vincent Connare. Connare seems to have a sense of humor about being known as "the Comic Sans guy", but insists that his most notorious creation has its uses, if not necessarily on ambulances and tombstones. "If you love Comic Sans, you don't know much about typography," he tells Garfield. "If you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby." But what does it mean if we love Trebuchet?...

2) Other languages have their own "quick brown fox". Even if you don't know that a pangram is a sentence with every letter of the alphabet, you've no doubt heard "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." English-language typographers aren't the only ones who use pangrams to show off their typefaces, and the choices mentioned in Just My Type can say something about the culture. The libertine French say "Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume" ("Bring this old whisky to the blond judge who smokes") while the wacky yet intellectual Dutch say "Zweedse ex-VIP, behoorlik gek op quantum-fysica" ("Swedish ex-VIP, pretty crazy about quantum physics"). But the Germans are all business in Hermann Zapf's pangrammatic aphorism: "Typographie ist zweidimensionale Architektur und bedingt extra Qualität in jeder vollkommenen Ausfuehrung" ("Typography is known for two-dimensional architecture and requires extra zeal within every job"). Yeah, good luck getting some cute animals to act that one out.

The original "font Nazis" were the actual Nazis. The most thorough totalitarians in world history didn't overlook typography, either. See that armor-plated Germanic script up there, the kind of type that seems to be sneering at you from behind a monocle? The Nazis insisted that it was the only typeface suitable for pureblooded Aryans to read. Until, at least, a couple of years into World War II, when the cost of producing that heavy, resource-intensive type got too high to justify. Presto: the Nazis decided that the previously mandatory Germanic script had actually been Jewish all along.

4) Eric Gill, one of the greatest fontographers of all time and the creator of Gill Sans, was a total freak. No font better exemplifies the stoic, civilized stiff-upper-lip attitude of 20th century England than Gill Sans - there could have been no better choice for the famous KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON poster. Meanwhile, its creator, Eric Gill, was carrying on "experiments" in incest and bestiality, meticulously recording it all in his diaries. This was all (icky) news to me, but well-known enough in the design community that Garfield cites a Typophile discussion about the ethics of using fonts created by scumbags.

5) The day of the font auteur is probably over. Speaking of Gill and his ilk, the pages of this book - and the history of typography - are filled with tales of heroic creators and their enduring, iconic typefaces, from Claude Garamond scraping away in the back alleys of 16th-century Paris to Tobias Frere-Jones's typeface Gotham carrying Barack Obama to the White House. But not only is the great-man theory of typography usually heavily mythologized - just about every one of these big names also had a staff working for him, and built on the type innovations of the past - it also might be coming to an end.

The rise of ClearviewHwy on the highway signs of the United States points the way (sorry) to a different approach for the dominant typefaces of tomorrow. Instead of some lone visionary reshaping the built environment through sheer alphabetical brilliance, ClearviewHwy was engineered through painstaking tests by a research & design team bearing an alphabet soup of postgraduate degrees. Design by committee worked in this case: ClearviewHwy is both more readable and friendlier than the familiar Highway Gothic.

There's plenty more of this sort of thing in the pages of Just My Type, from the domination of Swiss fonts, to what makes a font "punk", to Garfield's own nominations for the worst fonts in the world. If you're looking for a textbook on typography, this isn't it. But Just My Type just might inspire you to download a font-editing program and try your hand at the art of letters.