F/SF

All good stories must end. The writing and character development are still superb in this seventh book, but the pacing has become glacial. Nothing crucial has happened for the past couple of books and it feels like the author is milking every character and subplot dry. There's nothing left of the vigorous narrative of the first three books. As much as you get curious to know what will happen to Ben Shepherd or to the brain-wiring project at some point you need to move the main plot forward. I'm sure that the patient reader will be rewarded in the end, but that end is still 13 books away and at the current pace it feels like it may take three or four books for Kim Ward to even talk to Jelka Tolonen. Life is short. ( )

Continues the war between the Middle Kingdom and the agents of change. Remarkably gray characters. Anyone would have a very hard time to paint anyone with a uniform good/evil brush. ( )

The Broken Wheel is the second installment of David Wingrove’s epic seven volume series, Chung Kuo. If you are just coming into the series, the basic premise is that some 300 years into the future, the Earth has come to be dominated by the Chinese. Earth is broken into seven cities, one city for each continent, and each city is ruled over by a high-ranking member of an Imperial like court. Huge companies have come to dominate the economy and the owners of these companies enjoy virtually unlimited power and wealth, second only to the ruling families. A rigid system of living conditions and privilege attempts to keep everything, and everyone, in order.

While not totally dystopian, this is not a happy society either. There is court level intrigue, industrial espionage and guerilla warfare against the ruling classes. As befitting a story of this scale, the cast of characters is huge and the author has a four-page list of the major players. You will need this list, as Broken Wheel is a very complicated story to follow. It will be very helpful in determining motivation and allegiances if you read the previous volume, The Middle Kingdom.

Reading Broken Wheel can be compared to agreeing to enter into a MUSH: an old style role-playing game termed a Multi-User Shared Hallucination. These were text only games played over campus networks; think Second Life without the pictures. In these games, your life depended on forged alliances with people who may, or may not, be true allies. Such is the scope of Chung Kuo. Almost all of the major characters owe loyalty to more than one faction. Like a MUSH, enter the world of Chung Kuo, lose yourself for a period, then return to normalcy.

In addition to being epic in proportion, the story is well crafted. I doubt it will be as popular as Lord of the Rings, but the prose compares favorably to that major undertaking. As with Tolkien’s classic, once you start down the road of the Middle Kingdom, you will find yourself hooked. Light on science fiction and heavy on fantasy, this is an advanced time and some advancements in science do play a role, but it is the fantasy aspects of Broken Wheel that will keep you reading. ( )