Book of the day: Daylight on Iron Mountain by David Wingrove
It was the summer of 2067, that bright, hot summer before the beginning of the American campaign. And it was there, in the green shadow of Li Mountain, in that most ancient of places, Hua Ch’ing Hot Springs, sixty li east of China’s ancient capital, Xi’an, that they met.
Hua Ch’ing was an ancient place, even by Han standards. A sprawling summer palace, built into the green of the mountainside. First built on by the Chou more than two thousand years before, then followed by the Ch’in and Han, it was a place where Tang Dynasty emperors had once bathed, surrounded by courtiers and concubines, poets and politicians; a place of culture and long history.
Here the great poet, Tu Fu, had written his reflective poems, thirteen centuries before. Poems which still had the freshness of the dew-touched dawn.
There in the moon’s pale light on a clear and cloudless evening, beneath the ancient arch of the Fei Hung Ch’iao, ‘the Rainbow Bridge’, Tsao Ch’un floated on his back, naked as a newborn, looking up at the star-filled heavens.
Cover blurb
The generals of the Middle Kingdom await the decision of the emperor. The campaign to secure the border from China to Iraq has reached a strange impasse. Two blood enemies have united against their common cause. But with the lives of thousands at his whim, the exalted Tsao Ch’un, the Son of Heaven, cannot decide. Destroy the Middle East in one blinding flash? Or take another path?
In the court of Tsao Ch’un, men of power have become smiling lackeys, whose graces conceal their fear, or their ambition. With his family held hostage by the empire, General Jiang Lei finds himself appointed to a special task: the orchestration of the last great war against the West. The total dominion of America.
But life in the world of levels continues. No hint of war, or want, or discontent can infiltrate the oppressive, ordered society that replaces the world Jake Reed once knew. Since the first airships rolled over the horizon, nothing has been the same. His new life means new thinking, new customs, a new way of behaving, and with his every move scrutinized, Jake can only serve the bureaucracy of new China. But he is not the only citizen who feels discontent with the anodyne new order…
