The Land Leviathan: A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel

A device used for these books is that an ancestor of Moorcock's has found tales of Oswald Bastable, in much the same sort of style as the Warlords of Mars trilogy. This bloke goes looking for more, and finds some. Una Persson also makes an appearance. A more confident Bastable has gone adventuring again, but when he comes back in time, the world is a lot different to the one he left. Submarine adventures, Gandhi, a Black Atilla, and other strange national alliances must be navigated and dealt with.

The Land Leviathan continues the story begun in The Warlord of the Air and concluded in The Steel Tsar. Synopsis: Michael Moorcock's grandfather (Michael, also), goes searching for further word of the adventures of Oswald Bastable. He finds a beatiful valley in China where Una Persson, Bastable's ally from the first book, resides. Morning finds Moorcock abbandoned by Persson, left with a manuscript written by Bastable. Bastable, it seems, has gone back to the Temple of the Future Buddha, and travelled the streams of time again. This time, he returns two years ahead of his own 1902, but in a world remarkably different from his own. A child prodigy in Chile has invented fantastic devices to make life easy and render poverty a thing of the past, but world war has broken out, made all the more deadly when these fantastic new technologies are applied to warfare. Bastable's journeys take him aboard a pirate submarine, to a utopia in South Africa lead by Gandhi, and to the battle lines of the war between the Black Attila, the son of an American slave with a plan to conquer the world and his nemesis: the remnants of the USA and their allies: a federation of the Australians and Japanese. I think: The political/racial dithering of Moorcock and his character's white guilt and slow witted outrage cost him a fifth star for this story. However, when you have this much action in just over 170 pages, and it is crafted by the brilliant Michael Moorcock, you're in for a fun, fast paced read. That is exactly what this book delivers. With takes on the apocalypse, utopia, and what might happen if somone reconstructed the Death Star on land in the year 1904, and then unleashed it on the racist Kennedy patriarch, this is a fun book.

Following the premise of the Warlord of the Air, Michael Moorcock advances the tales of Capt. Oswald Bastable, trapped between timestreams. Making the basis of his story a character from E.S. Nesbit's children's books, Moorcock speculates about the fate of imperialism, technology, and racist cultures. Oswald Bastable is an unstable British officer full of Victorian ideals who faces a new world torn by a global war. The nations and people are familiar; Ghandi is President of Bantustan in south Africa where Al Capone is an airship pilot, and Joseph Conrad commands a submarine; Joe Kennedy and Herbert Hoover are desperate racists in a post-apocalyptic America. Moorcock follows every stream to its logical conclusion, and this book is powerful and disturbing in its depiction of an Earth where all nations are at war, and Bastable, who is product of the long, racist, imperial Pax Brittanica must come to terms with what racism has wrought, and must decide if he is on the side of his race, or the side of humanity as whole.

Don't fret that this book is out of print. It is included in the omnibus A Nomad of the Time Streams, currently available from White Wolf. This is the second in the trilogy of adventures centering around Oswald Bastable, an unwitting and unwilling time traveller who finds himself mysteriously drawn into worlds similar to our own, yet with wildly strange differences, and always in the midst of some terrible conflict. The first book in the series, Warlord of the Air, is actually more action-packed and exciting, but this novel has other merits. The vengeful Black Attila, the antagonist, gives some wonderful food for thought. Moorcock's flair for creating a sweeping landscape with a handful of words is near its apex in this novel, and his witty characterizations add spice to the work. The subject he tackles is a juicy one, probably better handled in Heinlein's novel Farnham's Freehold, but still worthy of a serious read. Recommended.