CHUNG KUO to be put on hiatus?

According to author David Wingrove, the Chung Kuo series may be put on hold after the eighth volume, The White Mountain, is released on 6 March 2014. According to the publishers, Corvus, the series has not been selling as well as they'd hoped (after the apparently initial solid performance of the first volume or two). Wingrove attributes the problems to difficulties in getting the books on the shelves of the UK's biggest chain, Waterstones (I certainly haven't seen any since the second volume, Daylight on Iron Mountain).

I would add my own theories to why the series has not sold well: surprisingly little interest from bloggers (myself and a couple of others excepted), the lack of a US publisher, and the highly unwise decision to publish the series as twenty relatively short volumes (300-350 pages or so) instead of ten reasonably-sized ones (600-700 pages, still vastly shorter than most novels by say Steven Erikson or Peter F. Hamilton). There also appears to have been a decline in interest in the series since Wingrove's original editor at the company left: the hardbacks stopped being published and the sending out of review copies has become spottier.

Still, Wingrove has confirmed that, even if Corvus do drop the series altogether, it will still see the light of day somewhere else or as a self-published work. And, somewhat bizarrely, the series has attracted the interest of Hollywood even as the publishers seem to have lost faith (more at the link).

In the meantime, Wingrove will be published a major trilogy through Random House, entitled Roads to Moscow. The first volume, The Empire of Time, will be released in April 2014. It will be followed by The Ocean of Time and The Master of Time. This work will focus on a war using time travel technology ranging through history (mostly European) from the 13th Century into the future.