Nomad of the Time Streams

Michael Moorcock

★★★☆☆

I picked up a set of this trilogy during the second year of Covid, based on some half-remembered appearances in one of Moorcock’s other stories, but not knowing much beyond that.

It’s kind of an odd mix: They’re deliberately old-fashioned, intending to evoke the adventure stories of the late 19th century down to the trope of the protagonist personally dictating his story to the author. But they also interrogate the assumptions of those stories, and of the real 20th century as compared to the alternate timelines involved.

A 19th-century British soldier in India – the kind who would read Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and take it seriously – finds himself flung into three wildly different futures and global wars, each of which disabuses him of some aspect of his worldview.

Warlord of the Air

European colonialism has continued well into the 1970s. At first, the time-lost Oswald Bastable thinks it’s a paradise, with airships and other advanced technology…until he starts noticing that, far from uplifting the colonized, society is still stratified, with the colonizers continuing to exploit the natives. Dissidents and an eastern warlord try to win him over to their cause.

The Land Leviathan

This world has been ravaged by biological warfare, and the story upturns racist narratives. While Europe slides into savagery and North America doubles down on racism, stable nations take shape in Africa, where one leader sets out on a mission to build an empire, conquer and re-civilize the west. It’s more visceral than the first, and hits closer to home for a white reader in the US…and it’s meant to. It’s basically Killmonger’s plan in the Black Panther movie, except the white guy has to admit he’s got a point. The title refers to a walking fortress.

The Steel Tsar

The least well-defined of the three, and the one least clear in what it’s trying to say. Bastable ends up stuck with an insurgency against a more democratic Russia. An insurgency led by an alternate Josef Stalin who is really taking the “steel” part too far. And this time around, the charismatic warlord isn’t right, or fair, or honorable, or fighting for anything resembling a just cause. He just wants to be a despot. And Bastable has finally learned to tell the difference.

Trilogy

All three novels are sprinkled throughout with real historical people in drastically different circumstances (Gandhi as the president of a multiracial South Africa that never went through apartheid or the various colonial wars, for instance), and characters like Una Persson from the larger Eternal Champion multiverse.

Bastable himself starts out kind of boring: he’s just this regular British soldier. Then he’s strung along as a combination audience’s tour guide and antagonist’s foil. But over the course of multiple realities he develops both a broader perspective on people and an ability to roll with the chaos and make the best of his circumstances, and he’s a more interesting character – as well as a much better person – by the end.

Recent editions bill the books as early steampunk. Maybe? OK, airships and colonialism, and a lead character from the late 1800s. I might call it proto-steampunk?

Anyway, they’re worth the read, but they’re also very dry, which is why I’ve given the trilogy 3.5 instead of 4 stars. (I need to update the site template to display half stars!)