Chung Kuo is primarily set 200 years in the future in mile-high, continent-spanning cities made of a super-plastic called 'ice'.
Others – in the Lowers – live in squalor, whilst at the bottom of the pile is 'Below the Net', a place where the criminal element is exiled and left to rot.
Beneath the cities lie the ruins of old Earth – the Clay – a lightless, stygian hell in which, astonishingly, humans still exist.
Political tensions between the two factions lead to assassination, biological and nano-technological terrorism, and ultimately to war and the outright destruction of whole cities.
The story is told through the eyes of a wide variety of characters from all levels of society: Triad bosses and assassins, emperors and artists, courtesans and soldiers, scientists and thieves, terrorists and princes.
2011 in e-book and March 2011 in hardback) and Daylight on Iron Mountain and a significant restructuring of the end of the series to reflect Wingrove's original intentions.