Customer Reviews

The Warlord of the Air (A Nomad of the Time Streams, Bk. 1)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sent out to deal with a troublesome warlord on the imperial frontier, Lieutenant Oswald Bastable, an army officer in 1902 India, unexpectedly finds himself in a 1973 where airships ply the skies and the British Empire continues to thrive. Feigning amnesia, he adapts quickly to life in a world which seems nothing less than idyllic. Yet Bastable's path soon leads to a series of adventures that cause him to reexamine his initial assumptions and lead him to embrace a cause very different from the ones he was trained to defend.

The first in "Nomad of Time" trilogy, Michael Moorcock provides readers of this book with an old-fashioned pulp adventure in a steampunk setting. This combination works thanks in no small part to Moorcock's skills as a writer, which produce a novel that transcends the ones that inspired it. He keeps the narrative moving along briskly, and adapts both the tropes of the form and the politics which drive the story in the later chapters to produce a highly entertaining read, one that has aged well in comparison to other novels of its type. This is an excellent starting point for someone wishing to explore the steampunk genre, as well as a fun read for anyone seeking a good book with which to pass the time.

The Warlord of the Air is the first of a trilogy of steampunk novels (Land Leviathan, The Steel Tsar) by Moorcock collected in the omnibus edition The Nomad of Time and later as The Nomad of the Time Streams. The story follows Oswald Bastable from 1903 who enters a mysterious temple city of Nepalese natives on a military expedition and somehow gets sucked into an alternative 1973. This is not 1973 recovering from the Vietnam War but rather a 1973 where no World Wars happened. Technology has progressed--somewhat--and the British Empire and their dirigibles rule the sky. Bastable, a product of his time (i.e. reluctant Imperialist but ultimately pro-British they-are-doing-their-best-providing-for-the-world's-less-fortune) learns the ropes of dirigible flying. However, he soon beats up an American racist and is forced to join in with some shady anarchist figures and eventually the Warlord of the Air!

Moorcock's novel has an interesting premise. However, the plot lacks detail, compelling characters (besides Bastable), and scenes of Lenin and Guevera bantering are just plain silly. I understand that the genre of steampunk (if we say Verne was not a part of the movement) was just incubating however, Warlord of the Air fails to live up the promise. That said, the anti-imperial and anti-racist message is welcome but the alternative utopia and technology will solve everything premise again, is just plain silly. I will still recommend this novel to anyone who likes a fast read but be warned there isn't much adventure, detail, or world realization to be found.

An excellent novel, a delightful throwback to late Victorian fiction filled with cameo appearances and pop culture references. Definitely worth the read.

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.

Oswald Bastable is an English army officer, sent on a mission to the mountains in the Nepal region. It does not go too well, and sick and delirious he stumbles into a citadel that is rumoured to have existed for all time.

When he wakes up, he is several decades in the future and the natives are not disposed to be too friendly.

This is the first volume relating the adventures of Oswald Bastable, and is continued in The Land Leviathan and concluded in The Steel Tsar.

Synopsis:
Owsald Bastable is a British soldier sent to negotiate with a warlord in the mountanous regions between Nepaul, Tibet, and India. The year is 1902. In a citadel that the locals claim is older than time itself, Bastable realizes he has been poisoned and flees into the dark of tunnels beneath the earth, becoming lost and eventually succumbing to the halucinations of the drug. Bastable awakes with rotted clothes attached to his body, hails a passing zeppelin, and discovers that, impossibly, he is in the year 1973, in a reality quite different from the one you and I know.

Bastable finds a world where imperialism has survived and there is a tenous peace between the great powers. Airships patrol the skies, and efficient steam power has replaced the gas engine. To Bastable's eyes, earth has become a utopia, but he soon finds the cracks beneath the surface. Bastable transisitons from a loyal subject of the British Empire to an accidental revolutionary, fighting against imperialism.

I think:
This is a short, fast paced, and wholly entertaining book. Moorcock manages to balance early steampunkery, political arguments, and pop culture references (Mick Jagger, a revolutionary named Guevarra, and Lenin all appear in this book, while Joseph P. Kennedy, Ghandi, and Herbert Hoover appear in its sequel). Unlike other reviewers, I did not find the book too short. It does, after all, have two sequels.

I wholeheartedly reccomend this book. It is a quick, fun read, and cheap if you get it used on Amazon. Furthermore, anyone who enjoys steampunk would be well advised to read it, as it seems one of the earliest examples of the genre.

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.

The alternate history that Moorcock proposes--one in which the colonial powers maintained and expanded their empires, scientific progress was retarded and great warships dominated the skies--is interesting, but the story he places therein is not very exciting and culminates in a predictable climax. In addition, the first third of the book, which explains how adventurer Oswald Bastable traveled to the future, is really an enormous non-sequitur. There is really no reason for the protagonist of this story to be a visitor from the past and, other than establishing that fact, nothing that happens at the beginning has any bearing at all on what happens in the rest of the story.

This is the first novel about Oswald Bastable and his travels through time. The novel starts with M.Moorcock telling the reader about his friend Bastable who claims to have gone through time. Oswald dictates that he found himself in a different Earth where wars were fought with air baloons. Oswald is a pilot of one of the baloons and is captured by an Asian warlord who plans to wage war against the world.

I found the novel to have an interesting storyline, but it was too slow paced and sometimes a bit too hard to read on.

The Warlord of the Air is the first of a trilogy of steampunk novels (Land Leviathan, The Steel Tsar) by Moorcock collected in the omnibus edition The Nomad of Time and later as The Nomad of the Time Streams. The story follows Oswald Bastable from 1903 who enters a mysterious temple city of Nepalese natives on a military expedition and somehow gets sucked into an alternative 1973. This is not 1973 recovering from the Vietnam War but rather a 1973 where no World Wars happened. Technology has progressed--somewhat--and the British Empire and their dirigibles rule the sky. Bastable, a product of his time (i.e. reluctant Imperialist but ultimately pro-British they-are-doing-their-best-providing-for-the-world's-less-fortune) learns the ropes of dirigible flying. However, he soon beats up an American racist and is forced to join in with some shady anarchist figures and eventually the Warlord of the Air!

Moorcock's novel has an interesting premise. However, the plot lacks detail, compelling characters (besides Bastable), and scenes of Lenin and Guevera bantering are just plain silly. I understand that the genre of steampunk (if we say Verne was not a part of the movement) was just incubating however, Warlord of the Air fails to live up the promise. That said, the anti-imperial and anti-racist message is welcome but the alternative utopia and technology will solve everything premise again, is just plain silly. I will still recommend this novel to anyone who likes a fast read but be warned there isn't much adventure, detail, or world realization to be found.