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The Warlord of the Air Michael Moorcock James Cawthorn 9780441870608 Books

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The Warlord of the Air Michael Moorcock James Cawthorn 9780441870608 Books

I enjoyed this book ... A fun read .. Twists and turns .. I may jolly well get another Michael Moorcock book ... A creative author


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The Warlord of the Air Michael Moorcock James Cawthorn 9780441870608 Books Reviews

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.
Moorcock tells this story in an alternative future, by the eyes of a typical soldier of the British Empire who is sent to an alternative future where the British Empire seems to have created an utopia. At least in the main character's eyes.

The British Empire after years without going to war ( the technology is not as advanced as it was back in our actual 1973) which leads to apparent economical and social advances. We will know later that the Empire is in fact lying in fragile foundations.

There are billions of people still starving and living in poverty while a few live happily enjoying the advances of science and all modern society goods. This book treats an universal theme, that is why it is so compelling and impressive. One can change history events but the very nature of man will remain "evil".

Look at the world these days, transpose the ideals presented here and realize Morcoock makes a portrait of our very own world. While some will be happy celebrating the new i-pad, downloading digital content for a few dollars, watching 3-D films, eating yogurt ice-cream ( because Oprah said it was healthier) others will still work for 14 hours to produce a consumer good for the rich. Yet this person will earn at best, a full plate of food.

This book is rather political in a way that the author shares his political views but he also succeeds describing a fantastic world. Essentially, a society lacking elements like poverty, exploration, some having better lives than others, social discrepancies, diseases, plagues, does not exist in reality. Well, that is why we call it utopia.

I personally agree in all terms with Moorcock he does not say that armed revolution is the way to change, in fact, it concludes pessimistically presenting a single fact all forms of riots lead to chaos and death of several innocent lives.

The "steampunk" and "dieselpunk" aspects of this book make it more impressive and interesting. The dirigibles populating the world skies, the Victorian and Edwardian way of life almost intact after 70 years yet that society can have access to the goods of the technology after those years.

Moorcock's style is rather elegant, precise. His technological descriptions expose details when necessary he does not waste time abusing of it to simply show erudition.

To me a great book is one that you cannot discern between reality while reading it is hard to stop reading. This was "Warlord Of The Air" for me.

Incredible, radical, fantastic and innovative. Five stars are few for rating it.
In 1902 Oswald Bastable, a young Indian Army officer, is sent on a mission to the remote Himalayan kingdom of Kumbalari. (Michael Moorcock borrowed the name “Oswald Bastable” from the Edwardian children’s writer E. Nesbit). While there he is caught in an earthquake and knocked unconscious. When he recovers, he mysteriously finds himself transported into the year 1973 but not the 1973 that we would recognise. This is an alternative 1973. Edward VIII is still King of Great Britain; presumably he never met Mrs Simpson in this version of history. (He was still alive when the novel was written in 1971, but was to die in the following year). The two world wars have never happened, Europe has been at peace for many decades and the European colonial empires still dominate the globe.

When Bastable arrives in the London of 1973, he thinks he has found Utopia .The city is far cleaner and more egalitarian than the one he remembers from 1902. Poverty, disease and squalor have been banished and the citizens all seem contented with their lot. Politics is dominated by the Liberal Party; the Conservatives still form the official Opposition but have not been in power for over thirty years. Socialism- virtually a dirty word in this society- seems confined to a few intellectual dissidents. We do not see what conditions are like in the rest of Europe, but the impression is given that, at least as far as the major powers (France, Germany, Italy and Russia) are concerned, things are as comfortable as they are in Britain.

The technology of this imagined 1973 is also different from ours. We learn that the petrol engine is regarded as outmoded and that cars are driven by steam power and motorbikes by electric engines. Steam trains have been replaced by electric monorails. More fundamentally, there are no heavier-than-air aircraft. The skies are dominated by gigantic airships, which play an important part in the plot, as after arriving in this new era Bastable finds a job working on board such craft. We are told that orthodox science regards heavier-than-air flight as impossible and that therefore no government has ever tried to develop such technology, although, as we shall learn, there is one part of the world where it has been developed in secret.

Alternate history writers seem to have a weakness for airships, although they are rarely able to explain convincingly why they have been more successful in their invented worlds than they were in the real one. No scientifically literate person in 1902, only a year before the Wright Brothers first conquered the air, would have regarded heavier-than-air flight as impossible. To create a plausible alternate timeline in which aeroplanes not only do not exist in 1973 but are considered a scientific impossibility, one would need a point of departure long before 1900. (Perhaps even before 1800).

“The Warlord of the Air”, however, is not intended as a serious piece of counter-factual history. As Keith Roberts did in “Pavane”, Moorcock is here using the conventions of alternate-history fiction to engage in some political and philosophical speculation against the background of what is essentially a fantasy world. (Both novels can be regarded as early examples of the steampunk genre, written before the word “steampunk” was coined). Moorcock distances himself from Bastable’s story by using that old literary device, the “Rahmentechnik” or “Framework Technique”. After returning to his own time as mysteriously as he left it, Bastable relates his adventures to the author's grandfather, also named Michael Moorcock, who writes them down, and they are then found by Moorcock junior among his grandfather’s papers.

Besides “Pavane”, other influences on the novel appear to have been Kipling’s short story “With the Night Mail”, which also deals with a world dominated by giant airships, and H. G. Wells’s “The Shape of Things to Come”, which deals with a group known as the “Air Dictatorship” who use air power to impose their own utopian vision on the world. Wells’s influence is particularly marked in the second half of the novel, in which Bastable is kidnapped by a group of airborne anarchist revolutionaries whose aim is to free the colonies from European rule. Among these is Lenin, introduced here by his real name Vladimir Ulianov, who in this world is still alive in his nineties. (Like a number of other alternate history writers, Moorcock introduces several real-world figures into his imagined world; we learn, for example, that Mick Jagger is here an army officer rather than a rock star. Sometimes he only uses their names; we meet a revolutionary named Guevara, but as he is a Portuguese Count this cannot be the Che Guevara of our timeline).

Realising that the colonised peoples do not share the prosperity and high living standards of their European masters and that the colonial powers are capable of using brutally authoritarian methods to maintain law and order, Bastable comes to sympathise with his kidnappers and their political goals. He also meets the sinister Chinese warlord General O.T. Shaw, the “warlord of the air” of the book’s title. (Shaw corresponds, roughly, to our timeline’s Mao Tse-tung, but unlike Mao he is the Oxford-educated son of a British missionary and a Chinese mother).

Although Moorcock’s politics are clearly on the Left, that does not necessarily mean that his political views can be identified with those of the revolutionaries, who in Orwell’s phrase seem to be unconsciously power-hungry, or with those of Shaw, who is quite consciously so, claiming to be a communist but aiming to make himself, in the extent of his power if not in his official title, Emperor of China. Nor are they to be identified with those of Bastable, who is naïve and foolish. When Bastable expresses the wish that war had had broken out years ago between the Great Powers so that the colonised peoples might achieve their freedom, he does not know what dangerous nonsense he is talking. Anyone who has lived through our version of the twentieth century- which Bastable himself, of course, has not- will realise not only that the First World War was far bloodier than any of the wars which preceded it but also that, far from making the world “safe for democracy”, it paved the way for new forms of tyranny crueller by far than the old ones which it swept away.

If Moorcock has a message in this book, it is “beware of promised utopias”, whether those utopias come from rightists promising order, peace and stability or from leftists promising revolutionary change and freedom. By the end of the book Bastable has been so seduced by Shaw’s vision of a New World Order that he is prepared to commit an act which will result in the deaths of many thousands, all the time believing that by doing so he will be striking a blow for the liberty of mankind. Ô liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!
I enjoyed this book ... A fun read .. Twists and turns .. I may jolly well get another Michael Moorcock book ... A creative author