I've read two books by Nelson DeMille, and both of them have been superb reads. A few years ago I read Up Country, about a former Army Criminal Investigator by the name of Paul Brenner, who is asked to visit Vietnam in order to look into a 30 year old murder. The main character is revisiting his former posting and a lot of the book covered him retracing his steps. It didn't sound like something I would like as the Vietname War is not a conflict I'm very familair with or particularly intersted in, but the sheer power of the writing drew me in and kept me enthralled throughout.

With that pleasant reading experience in mind, I decided to finally take a chance on another novel by Demille. I was in the mood for a good book by an American modern adventure author along the lines of a Clive Cussler, or a Tom Clancy, and I was really surpised and dissapointed that neither of these two were in stock on the shelves of a number of my local Charity shops here in the UK - but I did finally spot a pristine copy of Plum Island for a very reasonable £1, so nabbed it quickly and abandoned the boring book I'd been wading through to immediately start it. 

Nelson Demille was born in 1943 in the city of New York and soon moved out to Long Island. After a stint in the US Army during the late sixties in the aforementioned Vietnam War - where he was awarded the Air Medal, Bronze Star, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and Combat Infantryman Badge - he returned to education in order to earn a degree in Political Science and History. He had a string of jobs, but freely admits they "were so boring, I missed Vietnam." His first major novel under his real name was called By the Rivers of Babylon, published in 1978. Before this he had written under a few pen names, particularly as the author of the Ryker series from Leisure Books.

After including Dune in my list of favourite books of all time back in August, I knew I was going to have to give it a re-read. So, hot on the heels of a visit to the cinema to see the new adaptation by Denis Villeneuve (I was very impressed), I was even more keen to get stuck in. 

My overall concern with a re-read was that my first impression of the book, read as a young man in the late seventies/early eighties, might have been clouded by nostalgia. Sometimes the books you read as a young person, and are mightily impressed with at the time, don't necessarily have the same impact when visited as a more mature reader. The antagonist of Dune, Paul Atreides, is a 15 year old boy - probably the same age as myself when I first encountered it. Would that fact have had a major influence on my regard for the story? I vividly recall holding the paperback by NEL, with the classic Pennington cover, in my hands and devouring it at every opportunity - it was the biggest book I'd ever read at the time. I still remember seeing it in the bookshop, the thick blue spine looked so different next to all the other thinner science fiction novels on the same shelf. It 'felt' good to hold; it looked cool and it didn't have numbered chapters.

Unless you've been living under a stone (or alone in the desert) for the last 50 years, you'll know the general story of Dune. A family by ther name of House Atreides is tasked by ruling Emporer Padishah Shaddam IV with taking over the control of the planet Arrakis. The Royal decree also demands that Duke Leto and his family maintain the production of Arrakis's major export, the spice named Melange. Melange is a powerful drug that allows humans to attain amazing feats with just the power of their minds. One of these feats is the action of folding space across the vast exapnse of the universe, thus allowing interstellar flight between planets and systems - a momentous achievement that has literally brought about the forming of the human Imperium.

Leto is unable to refuse the request of the Emperor, but he and his advisors know that this is a doomed venture. They have been sent to an inhospitable planet entirely covered by a vast desert. The inhabitants of Arrakis are the native Fremen, a reclusive and secretive nation of wandering tribes who are able to survive on incredibly restricitve diets and very little water, whilst also hiding the true size and complexity of thier communities from thier foreign oppressors in the depths of the oceans of sand on thier planet.

Off of the back of the majestic light-fantasy/historical mashup that was The Initiate Brother, I was in the mood to spread my fantasy genre wings a bit more broadly, so I decided to delve headfirst into heavyweight territory and begin a series by prolific author L E Modesitt Jr. This series is collected together as The Imager Portfolio and consists of a total of twelve books at the time of writing.

This is full on fantasy with a captial "F". However, rather than wrapping this up in medieval society trappings with winged horses, dwarves, elves, hobbits and the suchlike, here we have a refeshingly advanced setting more in common with the Industrial Revolution and early Victoriana where there are (at least in this first book) no fantastical creatures to populate the pages or plot.

Modesitt has been around a while, and I was already well aware of his range of work and knew that he invests himself into fairly lengthy book series (The Saga of Recluse being the one I see everytime I wander around a bookshop - I think he's up to something like book 22 by now?), so I was prepared to invest a sizeable chunk of my time, and had an idea that with The Imager Portfolio already being listed at twelve installments of fairly lengthy novels this was going to potentially not be a fast-paced opener.

I wasn't wrong, Imager takes its time to tell its' story. However, Modesitt does it with such panache and skill that you cannot be anything but impressed. He has achieved that uncanny talent of making a day-to-day journal seem a lot more interesing than it should be. Hats off to him for that. Just when you start to think, oh this is getting a bit repetitive now, he pull out a surprise or two to keep things fresh or buck you up out of your seat and keep reading. Imager is one of those books that keep you wanting to read "just one more chapter before bed". It helps that the chapters are short too - I always find myself reading novels with short chapters so much quicker than ones with the opposite.

After having had such an amazing time reading the Asian-influenced first part of The Initiate Brother, I looked around for another book with a simialr theme. I was immediately tempted by my old collection of Chung Kuo novels.

I've toyed with Chung Kuo since it was published in the late eighties. I was remember being completely sold by my first sight of Book 1, The Middle Kingdom, when it came out with a beautiful cover that was predominently red around the borders, with Chinese dragons drapped over the top corners, and the image of an old Han sitting on a throne (see image below). Over the following thirty years, since I first tried to read the opening volume, it has haunted and daunted me to complete it. I'm going to try REALLY HARD this time to see it through to the bitter end (more on the end down below). But the sheer size of Chung Kuo can be a little intimidating.

The original run lasted for eight weighty tomes, and even though they are brilliantly written by author, David Wingrove, by their very nature I found them a bit difficult to get into at first. For me, the barrier holding me back was the inherent premise of the tale being told. You see, Chung Kuo (the new name for Earth) is about and  alternative future history where Chinese culture has become the dominant power on our planet, and because of that premise the number of characters with Chinese names takes a bit of getting used to. If you can get past this, then you will be truly rewarded with an excellent read.

Over a turbulant period (covered in later editions - see below) of Earth's history, the Chinese (or Han as they are referred to in these books) take over the running of our planet, and they impose their own culture and principles. As they rise to power they begin construction of a city that begins to expand across every continent. 

At the start of this first book, it has been 200 years since the upheavel and the City has all but covered every land mass apart from a few choice areas owned by the very rich and land that has been reserved for food production. The city is constructed of 'stacks' made up of 30 decks, with each deck having 10 levels and in total rises nearly 300 levels and 3 miles above the planet surface (now referred to as The Clay). As with any class-based culture, the lower your class, the lower the level you are allowed to live on. There are even sub-levels, below a protective security net that keeps the city free of ground-dwelling animals and diseases, this is where the criminal and undesirable elements are exiled too. Even with this enormous amount of living space, the population of 34 billion people is begining to stretch the resources of the massive administration. Added to this, the Hung Mao (i.e. non-Han) race crave for change; be that more political power, money, or simply the freedom to search the stars for places to expand the human race into; they are becoming more and more reactionary. There are many powerful men in this position, and they have become known as The Dispertionists.