Chris reviewed A nomad of the time streams by Michael Moorcock (The tale of the eternal champion -- 4)
None
4 stars
A Nomad of the Time Streams brings together in one volume the 'Oswald Bastable' stories: "The Warlord of the Air", "The Land Leviathan", and "The Steel Tsar". These novellas are strange Edwardian-baroque constructions, being essentially timeslip fiction as it might have been told by a pre-WW1 novelist, who assumed the Empire would last a thousand years and that the world of 1970 would be much like that of 1907 only more so. The collection (I shan't call it a trilogy; that would be to demean its origins) has the subtitle 'A Scientific Romance', so the reader can see what is to come. In each of the three stories Oswald Bastable is witness to barbarism and eventually to a world-shaking apocalypse. And as the Ukrainian anarch Makhno says at the end of the sequence, the only way that this repetition of disaster can be avoided, is for each one to take …
A Nomad of the Time Streams brings together in one volume the 'Oswald Bastable' stories: "The Warlord of the Air", "The Land Leviathan", and "The Steel Tsar". These novellas are strange Edwardian-baroque constructions, being essentially timeslip fiction as it might have been told by a pre-WW1 novelist, who assumed the Empire would last a thousand years and that the world of 1970 would be much like that of 1907 only more so. The collection (I shan't call it a trilogy; that would be to demean its origins) has the subtitle 'A Scientific Romance', so the reader can see what is to come. In each of the three stories Oswald Bastable is witness to barbarism and eventually to a world-shaking apocalypse. And as the Ukrainian anarch Makhno says at the end of the sequence, the only way that this repetition of disaster can be avoided, is for each one to take personal responsibility for that person's one life.
Some of the same characters appear in different identities in each novella. This is fairly common with Moorcock, especially here in the Eternal Champion sequence; so we have the anarchist Lobkowitz, the Indian Professor Hira, and Captain Korzeniowski who in our world may have taken up writing under the name of Joseph Conrad. Bastable, throughout the sequence, is no passive observer; trying to understand what is happening to him he is winkled out of his Imperial complacency and achieves a greater comprehension of the world and the political systems that make it go. He is at first an involuntary wanderer of the time streams, buffeted by disaster from one to another, but a nomad does not wander aimlessly, and during his travels he meets Una Persson, a 'chrononaut' or time-traveller (and who for some inexplicable reason is referred to in the back cover blurb as 'the red republican cosmonaut', as though she were Valentina Tereshkova). Persson is instrumental in widening his horizons as well as recruiting him into her anarchist league.
HG Wells, that indefatigable writer of scientific romances, would have recognised the politics as well as the love of describing vast machines. Airships occur in each of the stories: Bastable is never clear why they occur in each time line that he visits, but the practical airship with its ability for almost indefinite hover and its more considered pace, is a favourite Moorcock artefact. Then there is the Land Leviathan that the Black Attila, Cicero Hood, builds for his invasion of America; a vast thing like an armed ziggurat on wheels. In "The Steel Tsar", the Cossack hetman Djugashvili (who in our timeline was Stalin) represents himself and his power by means of four-metre-high robot effigies of himself, the first of which kills its maker - which may be a reference to the Russian Revolution and the way that those who created it were destroyed by Stalin's purges. The vast machines background stories of human individuals on a darkling plain, where ignorant armies clash by night.
