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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing read, but too short for its ambitious storyline, June 14, 2003
This book would probably be considered a forerunner or pioneering-novel in the genre of steampunk, being as it was first published in 1971 [1]. It is the first in a trilogy, of which the other two titles are _The Land Leviathan_ and _The Steel Tsar_. The entire trilogy is collected in a single volume, as well, entitled _The Nomad of the Time Streams_. The novel is essentially an alternate-history book thinly veiled in a poorly-thought-out time-travel story. (There's never any actual explanation or even a surmise as to what causes the protagonist, Oswald Bastable [2], to become unstuck in time.) Synopsis w/o spoilers: A man from 1902 is thrown forward to an alternate 1973, in which Imperialism is the dominant politial model for the world's superpowers. Technology has developed, as in Turtledove and Dreyfuss' _The Two Georges_, at a leisurely "British" pace, with zeppelins being the predominant form of airtravel. Bastable becomes embroiled in a revolutionary coup led by a modern asian "Alexander", a half Chinese half-English warlord whose dreams of overthrowing imperial rule are complemented by his cultivation of scientific advancements and artistic freedom. A couple of "real people" characters (a "Michael Jagger" who's an ordinary airshipman, Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianov (i.e., Lenin) as an old doddering "mentor" of sorts to the Warlord, and a character which in my edition bears the surname "Guevara" but is apparently in other editions known as Rudolph von Dutschke), but largely speculative fiction. Twenty-first century readers may find the occasional use of racist slang terms by the Imperialists offensive, though contextually/historically they make "sense," as it were. Lots of air battles between fleets of blimps and the like, though at 175 pages, Moorcock attempts to cram too much into too short of a novel. There's hardly any character development, and a lot of political agenda, but the tech is interesting and a lot of the cultural speculation is intriguing.
[1] Unless you want to make a case that steampunk goes back as far as, say, HG Wells and/or Jules Verne, which i suppose you could. I digress. [2] Incidentally, Bastable first appeared in literature as a child in a couple of Victorian novelist E. Nesbit's novels.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, November 27, 2001
An excellent novel, a delightful throwback to late Victorian fiction filled with cameo appearances and pop culture references. Definitely worth the read.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A Steampunk Anti-Utopia, July 21, 2008
Warlord in the Air is an amusing send up of the technological utopianism of Edward Bellamy and - especially - H. G. Wells. The novel follows the story of Oswald Bastable, a British soldier in 1903 who wakes up 70 years in the future. This future is not our own, however: he awakes in a world without war, a world with technological marvels including kinematographs, wireless telephones, and air ships, where neither of the World Wars occurred. But the price of universal peace, it seems, is the continuation of colonialism: none of the empires of the 19th century broke up; none of the revolutions of the 20th transpired; India, most of China, and many other parts of the world remain violently subjugated. Counterfactual versions of Joseph Conrad, Ronald Reagan, Lenin, Mick Jagger, and a number of others appear. All in all, a satisfying Edwardian steampunk novel.
What some other reviewers fail to realize is that the framing story of Oswald Bastable's unexplained time travel to the alternative future is self-consciously patterned on narratives by Bellamy, Wells, and similar utopian authors of the 19th and early 20th century. This conceit - along with the colonial scene it takes place in - is meant to communicate that the novel's future is an extrapolation from the utopias of the time period, one that reveals the racism and imperialism underlying some of their visions. Moreover, since the novel functions as a commentary on Bastable's original era, it would be incomplete without some reference to it.
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by Michael Moorcock
