Vampires & Witches: Hijacked by Taltos

Most people who have been engaged in popular culture or fiction at some level during the last 20 years are probably familiar with Anne Rice and one or two of her "gothic horror/fiction" novels, notably The Vampire Chronicles, that revolve around vampires.  She also wrote a trilogy regarding witches, called Lives of the Mayfair Witches, whose characters eventually crossed over into The Vampire Chronicles.  And if you lump in the two "outrigger" New Tales of the Vampires novels she did, you end up with fifteen novels total regarding the supernatural world of vampires and witches.

After many years of putting it off, I finally finished the last few novels in this multiple series amalgam, and much like the Chung Kuo review / commentary I did a few months ago, the ending left me a bit dissatisfied and bewildered, and I felt compelled to say something about these works as a result.

Please note that this post contains spoilers for all books in the three series listed above.  If you plan on reading all of them and don't want anything spoiled for you, stop reading now and come back when you've finished.  There will not be another warning.

If you've already read it or just don't care, read on.

The Background

First, a little background.  I discovered Anne Rice sometime in high school, probably around 1992.  I don't remember how I found her works, but I quickly devoured everything that was out at the time, which was only the first three in The Vampire Chronicles and the first book in Lives of the Mayfair Witches, entitled The Witching Hour.

I was blown away by these books, particularly The Witching Hour.  Anne Rice essentially set the standard for vampires in modern fiction, and I loved how realistic everything was, how the characters were tormented and struggling with their immortality and the fact they had to kill to survive, how they coped over the years.  I loved the vampire history that Rice presented, how it actually explained the vampires' origin (a malevolent spirit infesting the blood) and how it melded with the modern world without being too cheesy.  The thought of Lestat, the main vampire character throughout the series, being a modern-day rock star didn't sit with me well at first, but Rice made it work and I became a fan.

The infamous New Orleans First Street house Anne Rice used to live in,
used for the setting of The Witching Hour.

And then there was The Witching Hour.  I haven't read all of Rice's works, but I've read most, and I think this is by far her finest novel.  The rich and eerie history of the Mayfair family made for a 1,000 page page-turner with a shocking, cliffhanger ending.  I couldn't wait for the next book in the series.

I got heavily into both series after that.  I re-read them.  A few more came out and then the movie adaptation of the first vampire novel, Interview With the Vampire, staring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, opened and Anne Rice was a common household name.  I went to that movie on opening night in college and loved it.  A couple of years later, in 1997, I visited New Orleans over spring break with my older brother and sister-in-law, saw some of the landmarks mentioned in the series, took a guided "ghost and vampire" tour at night, and even stopped by Anne Rice's house on First Street to see it for myself.

Ebb and Flow

After college my interest in her books came and went like the tide... I would read old and new in chunks, then take a break for a year or two before picking it back up again.  I was severely disappointed in how the Mayfair Witches trilogy played out (more on that later), but continued to enjoy The Vampire Chronicles, though it did not seem like they were heading anywhere, the series reduced to individual memoirs with Lestat taking a backseat.  I figured she'd leave it open-ended and write a book from time to time.  I mean, how do you end a series about immortals?

Soon, however, she introduced the Mayfairs into the vampire storyline, starting with Merrick in 2000.  It seemed inevitable since both series involved The Talamasca.  I wasn't that thrilled with the book, though.  I got the rest of the books as they came out, but stopped after reading 2001's Blood and Gold (the 13th overall in the combined series) and watching the 2002 film Queen of the Damned (which unsuccessfully mashed together the books The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned).  That movie sucked, they butchered the story and Stuart Townsend wasn't half as good as Tom Cruise in the role of Lestat.  Rice has pretty much disowned that movie, from what I've read.

So I took a break and the last two books sat there.  I figured I would get to them in a year, perhaps.

Wrong.  I didn't read them until now, eight years later.  They've been sitting on my bookshelves, untouched that entire time.  I know it's eight years because I keep track of the dates for every book I buy (see my 2011 Media Consumption post to see how dorky I am) and my database says I bought the last volume, Blood Canticle, on 10/2/2004.  And it's definitely old... the top edge of the pages has yellowed over time.

So in trying to get through my incessant backlog, I finally read the last two books.  I had to read synopses of the earlier books in preparation because I hadn't touched them in years.  I wasn't sure what I was in for.  I knew Rice had left New Orleans after the death of her husband in 2002, and that she had rejoined the Church and had written fictionalized accounts of Jesus Christ.  But not much else, as I had lost interest in her after she stopped the vampire and witch novels.

The Books

Now, altogether I'm talking about fifteen books technically broken into three different series.  However, due to the crossover towards the end of The Vampire Chronicles, and the fact that two separate New Tales of the Vampires books are really no different than the other memoirs in the main sequence (and that Rice had seemingly given up on that grouping), they are part of the same world and should be read together, in my opinion.  The later entries in the Chronicles will definitely make more sense if you've read the Mayfair Witches.

The best order to read them, of course, is the order they were published in.  The italic abbreviations are the series and volume.  I also categorize them into three types: Lestat, Witches and Memoir.  The letter(s) in brackets represent those.  Some books are more than one.

Here are all fifteen:

1. Interview With the Vampire (1976) - tVC 1 [L, M]
2. The Vampire Lestat (1985) - tVC 2 [L, M]
3. The Queen of the Damned (1988) - tVC 3 [L]
4. The Witching Hour (1990) - LotMW 1 [W]
5. The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) - tVC 4 [L]
6. Lasher (1993) - LotMW 2 [W]
7. Taltos (1994) - LotMW 3 [W]
8. Memnoch the Devil (1995) - tVC 5 [L]
9. Pandora (1998) - NTotV 1 [M]
10. The Vampire Armand (1998) - tVC 6 [M]
11. Vittorio, the Vampire (1999) - NTotV 2 [M]
12. Merrick (2000) - tVC 7 [L, W]
13. Blood and Gold (2001) - tVC 8 [M]
14. Blackwood Farm (2002) - tVC 9 [L, W, M]
15. Blood Canticle (2003) - tVC 10 [L, W]

Lestat is undoubtedly the central character.  It's more about him than anyone else, and Anne Rice eventually went post-modern, having Lestat publish the earlier volumes in The Vampire Chronicles within the series itself, for the world to read as fiction and newer vampires to learn from.

Now, I think it's obvious that as the popularity of the series rose (particularly with the Tom Cruise movie in 1994), Rice focused solely on vampires and rode the wave of success.  Whether this burned her out, or she tired of it due to her husband's death in 2002 and rushed it (she finished the last volume, Blood Canticle, just two months before he died), or ran out of ideas and just came up with a quick way to "resolve" both series and fulfill contractual obligations at the same time... I don't know.  And it doesn't really matter.  What matters is that two series that started out fantastic and strong, were mashed together and died with a whimper.

My Anne Rice books.  Yes, two are missing.  Read on to find out why.
I also lost the dust jacket for The Vampire Armand, that's why it's
open to the title page in the pic.

The Beginning of the End

So... why don't I like the ending?  How did it die out?

First, as I mentioned before, there probably shouldn't have been a definitive ending to either series.  The vampires are immortal.  That series is a mish-mash of various stories and memoirs.  For something like that you just leave it open-ended.  Maybe you come back to it, maybe you don't.  The witches continue to be witches in the modern day, but perhaps use their powers for "good," like Rowan Mayfair does with the Mayfair Medical Center (or so we believe at first).  But the fact that the last book, Blood Canticle, actually says "THE END" with a date, when none of the other books do, makes it clear Rice was ending it all.

Second, I just have one word:

Taltos.

Oh Anne... why did you have to go there?

The introduction of the Taltos in Lasher (Book 2 of the Mayfair Witches), essentially ruined everything for me.  Everything.  Rice went from a fantastic book about witches (The Witching Hour) and turned it into some story about this ancient race of beings that are roughly 7 feet tall, are born aware, grow to human size soon after birth, live for thousands of years, etc etc. It's obviously inspired by the táltos of Hungarian mythology.

With the books Lasher and Taltos, however, what made The Witching Hour so awesome (the Mayfair family history) was mostly thrown out the window. Lasher the Mayfair Ghost becomes Lasher the Taltos (instead of just a human), he's obsessed with perpetuating his race (he dies instead) and the third book in that series, Taltos, focusing on more Taltos births by the Mayfairs, was horrible.  The surviving Taltos disappear at the end and it's left unresolved.  I hated it and the direction Rice had gone.

In fact, Lasher upset me so much that I ended up donating it to the public library.  I never bought Taltos, I merely borrowed it from a friend when it came out, and I'm glad I didn't waste any money on it.  So that's why both are missing from my book picture above.

The Crossover

I figured, okay, the Mayfair Witches was ruined, but I still had The Witching Hour, a fantastic book I'd gladly read again without bothering to read the sequels.  And The Vampire Chronicles were still decent.  I enjoyed the different memoirs that Rice was doing, focusing on familiar characters like Armand, Pandora and Marius, as well as some new ones like Vittorio and later in Blackwood Farm, Tarquin Blackwood.  At least she hadn't screwed that up, right?

Wrong.  Rice introduced the Mayfairs into the vampire storyline in Merrick, where the eponymous, outcast quadroon of a Mayfair becomes a vampire.  Which ends up ultimately being pointless since she abruptly kills herself a few years later at the end of Blackwood Farm, which I thought was a pretty good novel, especially that late in the series.

I personally think Rice writes best when the story involves a personal or family history.  Each one of those she has done has been quite engrossing.  The best books in these series are memoirs / histories.  The others, set in modern times, are weaker overall.  Rice has mentioned that she had trouble getting her ideas about the world down when writing through normal human characters, but had better success once she turned to non-humans.  This equates to past vs. present as well, it seems to me.

Blood Canticle

So as I mentioned, I liked Blackwood Farm, the penultimate novel in the series.  It was well done and interesting, had a good main character (Tarquin "Quinn" Blackwood) and a nice twist to the end which I didn't see coming.  While I didn't find the way Quinn interacted with his family and black house staff all that believable (maybe it's just because I wasn't raised in the South), I liked everything else.  It ends on a slight cliffhanger and I moved immediately into the last novel, Blood Canticle.

I guess the cover is okay...

This book has gotten panned in many reviews, and I'm going to have to add my voice to theirs.  It's not very good and is a far cry from the classic Rice novels.  Lestat is obsessed with becoming a saint now and just doesn't act like he used to.  This book is a mess, and reminds me of how Chung Kuo originally ended.  So like that blog post, here's a rundown of how ridiculous this book gets.

1: Anne Rice chastises her readership
This is the first novel since 1995's Memnoch the Devil to be narrated by Lestat.  And the very beginning is him chastising you, the reader, for not liking his last book, Memnoch.  I liked that book, but a lot of others didn't.  And I suppose it's in character... but it felt petty to me.  It reminded me of the movie Lady in the Water, when after taking a lot of criticism for his last few movies, writer / director M. Night Shyamalan cast himself as a character who's written works which will someday "change the world" and where a film critic in the movie meets a violent end.

2: Mona Mayfair becomes a vampire
Stop turning everyone into a vampire, Rice!  Lestat does this for Quinn, and everyone's lives are turned upside down.  Mona was near death, but now they have to find a way to explain to the persistent Mayfairs (Rowan and Michael) how she miraculously recovered.  Lestat has blown their cover, and Quinn is mostly to blame since he can't let go of his mortal life.  It's an interesting storyline, one that makes Blackwood Farm interesting, but here it just turns into a mess and precipitates all that comes later.

3: Lestat falls in love with Rowan Mayfair
This just feels wrong to me.  Why did this need to happen?  If you've read both series you know how weird this seems.  Rowan has gone to hell and back through the Mayfair Witches, and throwing all this vampire stuff on top of that is overkill.  Besides, I don't really like Rowan all that much after the events of The Witching Hour.

4: Drug runners in the Caribbean
Mona, now that she's a vampire, wants to find out what happened to her Taltos baby, named Morrigan.  Rowan and Michael tried to find her and Ash Templeton (the older Taltos who ran off with her at the end of Taltos) but eventually gave up.  Of course Maharet knows and tells Lestat via email, and within minutes they are off to the Caribbean island where the Taltos have hidden themselves - only to find it occupied by South American drug runners and the remaining Taltos captured.  Lestat and Co. just go through and kill all the drug runners in an extended action sequence featuring Matrix-style telekinesis and pyrokinesis that feels out of place.

5: The Taltos' efforts were POINTLESS
The ultimate insult is when you find out what happened to Ash, Morrigan and their Taltos children.  The children rebel, kill the parents, and fight amongst themselves.  Lasher spent hundreds of years manipulating the Mayfair's lineage so that he could be reborn in a Taltos to restart the race - and they failed.  They were not meant for this time, and cannot survive it in great numbers.  So all this crap was for nothing.  THEY FAILED.  And both series were ruined.

6: It's anticlimactic
Huh?  This sprawling saga about vampires and witches "ends" like this?  Usually when you end something, there's some kind of resolution.  The only resolution you get here is for the ill-begotten Taltos storyline that should have never been introduced in the first place, and the resolution isn't even any good!

The End?

So... the series came to a somewhat ignominious end (at least for me).  I am not happy with it.  I understood why Chung Kuo ended as it did.  I don't understand why Rice ended with Blood Canticle.  It's just not a good book or idea compared to the earlier entries.

But is it truly the end of the series for Rice?  In recent years she has left the Catholic Church (again) and turned back to some supernatural fiction with The Wolf Gift (her take on werewolves) and the Songs of the Seraphim series (about an assassin).

There's also something new she's working on called Born for Atlantis, which according to this November 2011 interview on The Daily Beast, is about:

"...several immortals sent to the planet during the time of Atlantis and it tells the story of what happened.  They're now still alive in the modern age and they're facing a crisis."

I don't know about you, but I would be surprised if this new book didn't feature Tommy Blackwood (from Blackwood Farm, Quinn's nephew) somehow, since he says many times that he wants to search for Atlantis when he gets older.  Could Rice tie this back into the Vampire Chronicles somehow?

She also mentions in the interview that she's working on something involving aliens.  Now, I've always thought that she should expand the Vampire Chronicles to the future somehow.  Enough with the books set in modern times or past memoirs.  Take it further.

Restart the series by jumping ahead a few hundred years.  What would Lestat be like he future?  Quinn after a few hundred years of vampire life?  Would they still be able to hide from society like they can now?  I don't think anyone has done a good take on vampires in the future yet (if anyone has any recommendations, I'm all ears).  The only decent part of Blood Canticle was the possibility of Rowan and her medical clinic getting a sample of Lestat's blood to analyze.  What would happen should modern day scientists understand vampirism on a scientific level?

So who else had this book as a kid?

Will we ever know?  Rice isn't known for science fiction, but she is planning the "alien" thing, and she's got good enough chops for fantasy and historical fiction - so she could pull it off.  You don't have to be technical or necessarily understand certain technologies in order to write an engrossing story set in the future or in space.

I can only hope she returns to the vampires at some point, which would turn the crappy ending into just another crappy middle book we can ignore.  But unlike Chung Kuo, there won't be a "remastering" of the end.  We're stuck with it.

Damn you, Taltos!  *shakes fist*

Next:

[Books 16-17] Prince Lestat and Two New Vampire Books

Chung Kuo: Last Call for Greatness

Over the last few months (since January, in fact) I have been reading this 8-book science fiction epic series called Chung Kuo, by David Wingrove.  I just finished the series, and felt compelled to write something about it.  I don't do many reviews these days, but this will be part review and part commentary on the experience of reading this epic.

The only good logo I could find online.
From the official website.

The Background

A little background on the series.  I had never heard of it until late last year, when someone recommended it on Kindle Boards (I post there every once in a while).  I did some investigating and found the premise fascinating and immediately searched online for it - only to find that it was entirely out of print even though it was not that old (1989-1999).  Apparently the author was "forced" to complete the series a book ahead of schedule by the publisher (there were supposed to be 9 total), that he didn't get paid for it, that very few people liked that last, rushed/condensed book (#8) and that it had a short print run, making it very rare and commanding prices upwards of $40-$50 online for a used copy.

Then I discovered that the series was in the process of being reissued as 20 volumes by a new publisher, with 2 new prequels and a rewritten ending.  How do they get to 20 from 8?  Well, the originals are quite long (roughly 250K-300K words long each), so each of them were split into two volumes for the "recasting."  Intrigued, I noticed that the first prequel (Book 1 of the new version) had just recently come out.  So I got it on my Kindle and figured I could read the series as they were reissued, rather than buy the original version - the schedule was for 4 books a year for 5 years.  That's pretty fast, I thought.

The Premise

It's hard to be brief when you're talking 8 large volumes, but here is the setup in a few paragraphs:

Nearly 200 years in the future (the original version of the series spans 60 years: 2190 - 2250), the world is dominated by the Chinese, or the Han as they are called in the story.  They essentially conquered the world by the late-21st century and built vast continent-spanning Cities made of a super-material called "ice."  There are seven Cities, one on each continent (except Antarctica, which is ignored), two on Asia.  These cities are massive, rising thousands of feet into the air, with hundreds of levels that people live on.  Beneath the Cities themselves is what's called the Clay, the actual earth upon which these Cities rest, which houses the remains of old Earth and stunted humans that have regressed.

One term the Chinese have for their country is Zhōngguó, which basically means "Central State" or "Middle Kingdom."  The Anglicized version of that name is Chung-kuo, hence the title of the series.  The Chinese have renamed Earth to Chung Kuo.  And their empire doesn't stop at Earth - there are colonies on Mars and various industrial operations throughout the solar system.  The rulers of Chung Kuo (the seven T'ang) even have palaces in space, orbiting the planet.

At the center of the epic is what is called The War of Two Directions.  This essentially is the struggle between those who want change (the West, non-Chinese) and those who don't (the East, Chinese).  The Chinese have been winning this war in a variety of ways, one being that the true history of the world was abolished and rewritten to say that the Chinese have been dominant for thousands of years.  Over time the few that remembered the truth died, their descendants forgot and soon accepted what they were told.

The Prequels

(Minor Spoilers)

Sounds like a kickass premise for a sci-fi epic, right?  That's because it is.  Essentially what I expected was that by the end of the series, we'd see the vast empire of Chung Kuo torn down somehow, as no empire lasts forever.  History has shown us that, right?

So I start reading the first entry in the recasted 20-book version, Son of Heaven.  The first two books are new prequels, covering the years 2043 - 2098, and explain how the Chinese came to conquer the world, how they built their enormous Cities and made the world Forget about the past.  This first book was slow to start, but picks up about halfway through.  I thought it was awesome.  It was realistic and gripping.

It also made me think... if suddenly our economies completely collapsed, what would I do?  Where would I go, and what lengths would I go to protect myself and my loved ones?  Watching the main protagonist (Jake Reed) go through the collapse of society, the aftermath and then the coming of China and the Cities - it was fascinating.

And the next prequel, Daylight on Iron Mountain, took that even further.  Here we see Jake Reed growing old, the current world in the new Cities so drastically different than what he was born in.  He has fallen on hard times and just cannot let go of the old world, much to the consternation of his progeny.  It is very sad and touching to see how he copes with that as the seven T'ang wrest power from the tyrant Tsao Ch'un, the man who conquered the world and built the Cities.  These new books set up the rest of the series perfectly.

So I Bought The Original Version Used

After the prequels, I couldn't wait for the rest of the recasting to get released.  It was scheduled to end in 2015, but things were already delayed and off to a slow start.  Impatient, I decided to just buy used copies of the original 8-book version.

So I ordered the originals used off eBay.  Even the rare Book 8, which I bought from a UK seller and spent $34 on (for a normal paperback).  Below is the list of books in the original version:

1. The Middle Kingdom

2. The Broken Wheel

3. The White Mountain

4. The Stone Within

5. Beneath the Tree of Heaven

6. White Moon, Red Dragon

7. Days of Bitter Strength

8. The Marriage of the Living Dark

The used copies I bought of the original 8-book series.

The Reaction

I can confirm that most of the series is awesome.  It has just about everything you'd want in an epic tale. There is a ton going on, lots of story threads, yet Wingrove weaves everything together into a cohesive tapestry and the more you read, the more you want. He sure can write, there is no doubt about that. The series is a fascinating view into how events shape the future and I loved seeing how the world changed within the lifetime of the main characters, and how they changed (or didn't change) with it.

It also added many twists and interesting subplots that I did not expect, and expanded beyond Earth / Chung Kuo to Mars and the moons of Jupiter.  It's like a casino buffet for fiction: anything you want, any time of day.  It has touching and shocking moments, some so graphic and disturbing that I had to pause for a bit and think about what I'd just read.  There was one near the end of Book 3, The White Mountain, during Kao Chen's storyline.  When you read it, you'll know what I mean.  It is easily the most shocking moment of the series for me and shows just how cruel humans can be to one another.

He's not afraid to kill characters, either. Before George R.R. Martin was famously killing main characters, Wingrove was doing it. Each book has a list of characters at the beginning, and by Book 8 the list of dead characters is 12 1/2 pages compared to the 4 pages of living characters.

And some of the science behind the world is also explained here and there.  When I started, I was confused about the Cities.  Did they cover all of the land?  If so, how is oxygen generated for the atmosphere?  Where did all the food for tens of billions of people come from?

The size of the Cities are a bit vague and halfway through the series you learn that they really only cover certain parts of each continent.  The rest, like mountain ranges and generally uninhabitable areas, are left vacant.  Massive oxygen generators are built across the world to help maintain the atmosphere. There are giant plantations and orbital factories for food, as well as massive "meat animals" that are nothing more than a huge cube of living flesh that is alive, ever growing, trimmed regularly to provide meat for the masses.

Pretty wild, but it all fit into the context of the series and felt realistic to me.  It truly was an epic, unlike anything I'd ever read before.  The review blurbs painted it as a mix of Dune, Blade Runner and Shogun.  That sounds about right.

Um... kinda looks like Chung Kuo, I guess.

And then I came to the final book.


NOTE: HARDCORE SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE SERIES AFTER THIS POINT!  SKIP TO THE VERY END IF YOU DON'T WANT ANYTHING SPOILED.

The End

I was nervous when I started Book 8, The Marriage of the Living Dark.  Was it really as bad as everyone said?  Most reviews I've found have panned it.  You can find some on Amazon, but here are a few that you might want to check out.  The titles alone say it all.

The Worst Ending Ever to a Novel?
Marriage of Disappointments

The giant spider here is your clue to the
craziness that soon follows...

Anyway, by Book 7, Days of Bitter Strength, the great Cities are gone, destroyed, all the T'ang but one dead, yet humans are still at war with each other.  Without any new frontier on Earth to discover, all they do is fight and bicker for power.  History repeats itself.  It seemed the only way forward for the Human race at this point was to leave Earth and colonize the stars, much as many left Europe / Asia and colonized the Americas hundreds of years ago.  Spreading our seed, so to speak.  And it seemed that's where it was headed, for at the end of Book 7 a plague had devastated much of the world population and some survivors were doing just that.

But that's not really where it went.

I will admit, Book 8 is a page-turner.  Wingrove knows how to keep the reader engaged.  It's just about the longest in the series, but I zipped through it in a week, faster than any other volume.  And you can guess where things got condensed and rushed, because there were 4 parts when normally there are 2 in each book.  The volume essentially brickwalls from climax to climax with little filler in the second half.  Major events and deaths are skipped and mentioned off-handedly later on to help speed things up.

Now, in all fairness this happens occasionally throughout the entire series, but here it was too much - especially when it's the death of a major character.  After 7 books of following a character, to be suddenly told, "Oh yeah, he's dead now... anyway, to get back to what I was talking about..."  To be suddenly told that is a kick in the teeth.

Something's Not Kosher...

But what's even worse is how the story takes the low road to WTFVille and pretty much throws out the window everything that happened in the previous 7 books.  Again, to be fair, there are small clues throughout the series that some things are not exactly kosher in the world.  But those are drops compared to the coming tsunami.

There's this Western character named Howard DeVore who, at the beginning, basically wants to overthrow Han rule and destroy the Cities.  A worthy aspiration, you think.  He starts out okay, the underdog you want to root for... then soon degenerates into this ruthless, sadistic psychopath who wants to destroy all life and colonize the world with millions of copies of himself.  He anticipates everything.  And I mean everything.  He has an answer for every plot against him.  A back-up plan for every failure.  Even when you think he's killed (in Book 4, I think), oh no it wasn't really him, the whole time the real DeVore was on Mars and the one you were reading about was some clone he sent to Earth.  Really?  It gets tiresome and it's no fun to read when you know he's going to get away every time.  Oh, and he doesn't seem to age, either.

Then there's Tuan Ti Fo, a wise old Han who kind of abruptly appears in places where he shouldn't be without explanation.  It confused me, but I figured that despite all the DeVore nonsense, the series is ultimately rooted in reality and there will be some kind of explanation eventually.  Who knows what kind of technological advancements we'll come up with 200 years from now, right?

Then two younger characters establish some kind of mind bond where they can talk to each other telepathically.  It's weird and not fully explained, yet it works within the context of the series and the progression of the science of the day, so you suspend your disbelief a little bit to cover that.

So we have these little drops of "strange things" going on from Day 1 and as a reader you are aware of that, but generally gloss over it all because the rest of the series is solidly grounded in reality and science, is gritty, hard-edged epic sci-fi filled with tons of action and drama and interesting subplots, and you never know where it's going next.  Even the subplot of the Old Men searching for immortality (and eventually succeeding by transferring a mind to another body) was realistically done.

WTFVille

But then, in the last half of the final book, we enter WTFVille.  I don't mind surprises or unexpected directions, there had been a lot already and I had embraced most of them, but this got too wild even for me.

David Wingrove even admitted to sffworld.com recently that he "got the ending wrong."

"...the real reason I wanted to rewrite and rework CHUNG KUO was because I’d got the ending wrong. Totally wrong. To my annoyance and to the fans’ annoyance. If you stick around long enough to read Books 17-20 in the new edition, you’ll see a radical transformation of the material. You’ll have the ending it ought to have had first time round. One which, I hope, will move the reader, not leave them with a feeling of disappointment."

So let me just briefly go over the mess that is the old ending, just to give you a taste of how ridiculous it is.  I can only hope that Wingrove truly means the current ending will change, and not just be an expansion of the existing one.  Because he's right, it merely left me with a feeling of disappointment.

1: Voracious Plants
Earth is suddenly overrun by "floraforms" - mutated genetic material released from the labs of a prominent research company.  The entire planet is slowly turning into intelligent flowers while the humans fight each other.

2: Immortal Space Spiders
DeVore and Tuan are not actual people, they are interstellar, immortal, giant space spiders - a race called the Eddariminaru (and hence the cover of the book).  The two are twins, but DeVore had "forgotten" who he really was, and spent thousands of years on Earth, unaging, sowing discord throughout history.

3: Parallel Universes
One of the main characters, Kim Ward - a scientific genius who came from the Clay and heads the effort to leave Chung Kuo and journey to a new planet - stumbles across a way to enter a parallel universe.  It's like the current one, but slightly different.  He meets his doppelganger in the alternate universe, they collaborate on jumping back to Chung Kuo to stop DeVore once and for all, but in an alternate universe that's much closer to "reality" (i.e. the Chinese never took over the world, Li Yuan is instead a stockbroker, his once-wife Fei Yen a whore, etc).  The two Kims have a three-way with the first Kim's wife.  Oh, and there are now two DeVores to destroy.

4: Oh Hey, FYI, He's Dead
Really Important Main Characters abruptly die off-screen.  Why care for Kim and the struggles he's gone through across 8 books when he's only going to get shot in the head off-screen at the end and be replaced by yet another of his doppelgangers (the second one, his first gets killed too), one named Joseph from a parallel universe?

5: The Chung Kuo That Never Was
Both "immortal" DeVores are destroyed easily and people from both realities merge into a new one, and they are on a new planet and can begin a new life, forgetting about the Eddariminaru aliens and the science behind parallel universes.  Which means the Chung Kuo universe we've been reading about for 7 books really never existed and is gone...?

WTF?  Doesn't all that sound ridiculous?  That's because it is.  It's essentially the same reaction I had after seeing J.J. Abrams's horrible 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise that took a huge, steaming dump on everything that previously happened in that universe.  And it doesn't help that all of the characters (even in the parallel universe that's supposed to be more "real") basically accept all the strangeness that's going on as if it happened every day and not once in a billion years.  It is not believeable at all.  Not after the content of the previous 7 books.

In Retrospect

I'm really not upset by how the final book came out as a whole.  I understand why it seems rushed and why events are glossed over, based on what Wingrove said.  I understand why some characters suddenly vanish and are barely heard from again, their actions 10 years later unexplained.  I understand the trade-offs and cuts he had to make to get to the end.  I applaud the fact that he gave us some kind of conclusion even though he wasn't getting paid.  It's the conclusion he did arrive at that I don't understand.  It's his story, of course, but still... it's baffling to me that he would end it that way after all that came before.

I was okay with those guys being aliens.  I can accept that.  But the alternate reality crap and jumping around at the end and merging was so unnecessary and confusing.  It turned what was a gripping, serious and believeable sci-fi epic into a laughable and campy farce that's so ridiculous you actually can't stop reading.  By that point the Chinese/Han element of the story has completely vanished.  It's not about Chung Kuo and the War of Two Directions anymore, it's Immortal Space Spiders vs. The Three Kims Across the Eighth Dimension!

The idea of aliens helping humans when they are on the cusp of new technology and science, helping them colonize the stars - that's an ending I could have lived with it. The series would then basically be about the next evolution of the human species, and the united world of Chung Kuo was the last great attempt at an empire on our home planet of Earth.  I thought that was the point of the series.

Yet in Wingrove's Buckaroo Banzai version, the last few chapters basically invalidate everything that went before it.  It's almost as if Wingrove himself became the First Dragon and was told to wipe out the true history of Chung Kuo in order to start a new world, much like the Han in the series wipe out the true history of the world and build their Great Cities over it.

I can only hope that Mr. Wingrove has now morphed into Shang Han A (Hannah) and written the true history and conclusion of Chung Kuo with his recasted version, and I hope he can forgive me for being a bit harsh.  He did have this to say in that same sffworld.com interview I quoted earlier, so the future is looking good (Books 17-20 in the new recasting basically correspond to Book 8 in the original version):

"...Book Nineteen, THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE ... will be an entirely new book. Four long chapters of it are already done. After that, books 17, 18 and 20 will receive a cut and paste job with at least fifty per cent of new material added to each. And the ending, LAST QUARTERS, will receive the most radical reworking of all (for a start it’ll be twenty times larger!). As I said earlier, I want the reader to go away this time round with a lump in the throat and the whole thing resonating in their head, and with them wanting to start the journey all over again."

I will say, though, that having read the prequels first and armed with the knowledge of how the world "ended" - Jake Reed was involved in the global stock market and saw the whole thing collapse - it was nice to see that element again in the alternate reality at the end.  It felt like it was coming full circle (pun intended if you've read the last book), which I'm sure is part of his intention with the new recasting.


END HARDCORE SPOILERS.  THANKS.


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Last Quarters

Alright.  So I loved the original series until the last half of the last book.  It's tough to recommend that version, though, because you will get addicted to it and most likely only end up disappointed and feeling incomplete like me.  I haven't read anything quite like it, though, so in the end, if you have the chance to read the original 8-book version, I recommend it merely to experience something different and sufficiently epic.

One side note... it was nice to be able to read a long series like this for the first time without having to sit and wait for the next volume.  I did that with Harry Potter; I refused to read any of it until the last volume came out.  As I've mentioned before, I've been burned by neverending and meandering series that span decades of my life (The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire) and I'm very reluctant to start anything without an actual end these days.

All I can say now is to repeat my hope (prayer, really) that the new ending in the 20-book version is truly the "right" one that Wingrove keeps mentioning, and not merely an expansion of what already exists in the original Book 8.  If it is different, and lives up to the quality of the material that preceded it... then this will definitely be an epic for the ages.

For more info on Chung Kuo, you should visit the following sites:

http://chung-kuo.net/ = David Wingrove's official site for the series
http://ofgiftsandstones.com/ = A fansite (the only one, really)
http://chungkuo.wikia.com/wiki/The_Chung_Kuo_Wiki = Work in progress Wiki
http://corvus-books.co.uk/ = Publisher of the new 20-book recasting