The Warlord of the Air
Read The Warlord of the Air Online
Authors: Michael Moorcock
COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS
A NOMAD OF THE TIME STREAMS
The Land Leviathan
(April 2013)
The Steel Tsar
(August 2013)
NOMAD OF THE TIME STREAMS
NOVEL
THE FIRST ADVENTURE
A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE
TITAN BOOKS
The Warlord of the Air
Print edition ISBN: 9781781161456
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781161487
Published by Titan Books
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144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: January 2013
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Michael Moorcock asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 1971, 2012 by Michael Moorcock.
Introduction copyright © 1993, 2012 by Michael Moorcock.
Foreword copyright © 2012 by Kim Newman.
Edited by John Davey.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For Michael Cornelius Dempsey, who died, as he had lived, a captain of his own ship
Book One: How an English Army Officer Entered the World of the Future and What He Saw There
Chapter One: The Opium Eater of Rowe Island
Chapter Two: The Temple at Teku Benga
Chapter Three: The Shadow from the Sky
Chapter Four: An Amateur Archaeologist
Chapter Five: My First Sight of Utopia
Chapter Six: A Man Without a Purpose
Book Two: More Strange Events—a Revelation —and Several Disasters!
Chapter One: A Question of Employment
Chapter Two: A Man with a Big Stick
Chapter Three: Disaster—and Disgrace!
Chapter Four: A Bohemian “Brother”
Chapter Five: Captain Korzeniowski
Chapter One: General O.T. Shaw
Chapter Two: The Valley of the Morning
Chapter Three: Chi’ng Che’eng Ta-Chia
Chapter Four: Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianov
Chapter Five: The Coming of the Air Fleets
Chapter Six: Another Meeting with the Amateur Archaeologist
F
irst published between 1971 and 1981, Michael Moorcock’s
The Warlord of the Air
(or is it
The War Lord of the Air
?— editions vary),
The Land Leviathan
and
The Steel Tsar
—three books known collectively as “The Oswald Bastable Trilogy” or “A Nomad of the Time Streams”—look backwards, forwards and sideways at the same time.
In 1969, there were people going around seriously saying that science fiction would die as a genre after the moon landing. The future was here, so we didn’t need to think about it any more. Certainly, the genre had been around long enough by then for its earlier examples to seem comically outdated—all those books and stories where there’s a breathable atmosphere on the moon, or astro-navigators fiddle with slide rules on their faster-than-light spaceships. Still, there were people who saw the beauty and the terror and (most importantly) the continued relevance of the futures which didn’t happen.
In Moorcock’s novels, army officer Oswald Bastable—the name comes from a series of books by E. Nesbit, author of
Five Children and It
—comes unstuck in time from his own era (1903) and tours three overlapping, yet different, imagined versions of the twentieth century... where the British Empire persists into the 1970s, technological advances lead to a war that leaves the world in ruins in the early 1900s and a Russian revolution did not lead to a Soviet state. Constant in all these fractured mirrors of our own history are airships, stately hold-overs from the exciting books of Jules Verne
(The Clipper of the Clouds)
and George Griffith
(The Angel of the Revolution),
and the atomic bomb (which arrived in fiction in 1914 in H.G. Wells’
The World Set Free).
The point is not, as in some meticulously constructed and argued alternative histories, to imagine how things might have been, but to confront the way things really were, as our collective urges for incompatible utopias brought about horrors beyond imagining. Though not averse to blaming individuals, these books are strong on collective responsibility: there are versions here of Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell and Harold Wilson, as sad little men whose small-minded blind spots, ambitions and cruelties bring about personal and global disasters. But no one is let off the hook, and we’re all to blame.
The voice of these novels is a perfect match for the Victorian and Edwardian authors evoked over and over in them... not just Wells, Nesbit and Griffith, but Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling
(With the Night Mail),
Saki
(When William Came
—a novel Moorcock brought back into print in the anthology
England Invaded
), George Tomkyns Chesney
(The Battle of Dorking
) and many other scientific romancers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moorcock can embrace, with love, the idealism and imagination expressed in these writers’ works, though as many were catastrophists as utopians, but recognises that they share in the collective responsibility for the way the world really turned out. A key influence on the steampunk movement in contemporary fantasy, these books are spikier, more clear-sighted and complicated than most superficially similar visions of technological Victoriana.
These books are Griffith-like yarns—full of scrapes, adventures, exotica, jokes, plot reversals and charm—but they’re at heart serious, sobering visions. I am delighted they are available again, and so will you be.
KIM NEWMAN
London, 2012
O
ne of my favourite childhood writers was E. Nesbit, creator of
The New Treasure Seekers, The Railway Children, Five Children and It
and Oswald Bastable.
Nesbit was a socialist, a Fabian, a friend of H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw and others. Her wit, irony, common sense and humanity informed her stories, especially those about Oswald Bastable, who was probably the first “unreliable narrator” I had encountered. It seemed to me that she put the very best of herself into those books, and I continue to value them for the way she made me see things freshly, without ever appearing to preach. With Richmal Crompton’s William stories, E. Nesbit’s are amongst the few books specifically published for children that I remember enjoying.
I have always had an enthusiasm for late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction and look forward to a time when Arthur Morrison, W. Pett Ridge, Israel Zangwill and many others will at least be represented by a paperback or two. We let too much that is good and valuable in our culture slip away from us and almost vanish. We are inclined to mock writers for their “clichés”, when frequently they were the first to solve their technical problems with methods which only
became
clichés in the hands of later people. To read them in the context of their times is, perhaps a little paradoxically, to appreciate them as they were when they were first popular.
I am a huge admirer of Shaw and Wells and, while I never quite accepted their particular politics, I find it difficult to understand why, supposedly because of the fall of the Eastern autocracies, so many people now patronise socialism as if it were merely an aberration or a “wrong path”. As I suggested to John Major when he told us that socialism was dead, he should not be too triumphant. After all, until his predecessor revived it, we thought feudalism pretty much over and done with, too.
Paternalism and centralism, the bane of capitalist as well as socialist politics, are for me the permanent enemy of democracy. It was my wariness of paternalism, especially as it is these days applied, which inspired this sequence. Paternalism (and its associated centralism) still deeply infects much of our modern political thinking. Apart from Prince Kropotkin, that most kindly of anarchist intellectuals, few of the great thinkers and artists of Wells’ day (including Wells) perceived or wished to examine what Rosa Luxemburg was to perceive—and for which she was attacked with brutal rhetoric by much of the orthodox left—that their social solutions, however well-meant, however they hoped to achieve the millennium, to give self-respect to “minorities” and the poor, were always doomed while they kept to their prescriptions. Still later, Orwell was attacked by the left for pointing this out and, most recently Andrea Dworkin has received similar criticism for refusing to accept the consensual, easier view.