A Nomad of the Time Streams
Dust-jacket from the first edition
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| Author | Michael Moorcock |
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| Original title | The Nomad of Time |
| Cover artist | Fred Labitzke |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Science Fiction Book Club |
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Publication date
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1982 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 442 pp |
A Nomad of the Time Streams is a compilation volume of Michael Moorcock's early steampunk trilogy, begun in 1971 with The Warlord of the Air and continued by its 1974 and 1981 sequels, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar. The trilogy follows the adventures of Edwardian-era British Army Captain Oswald Bastable in alternate versions of the 20th century.
In the first book, Warlord of the Air, Bastable finds himself transported to an alternate late-20th century Earth where the European powers did not stir each other into a World War and in which the mighty airships of a British Empire on which the sun never set are threatened by the rise of new and terrible enemies. These enemies turn out to be the colonized peoples trying to break free, supported by anarchist and socialist Western saboteurs opposing their own imperialist societies, and led by a Chinese general whose country is still nominally under Western control and ravaged by civil war.
In The Land Leviathan, Bastable visits an alternate 1904 in which most of the Western world has been devastated around the turn of the 20th century by a short, yet terrible war fought with futuristic devices and in which also biological weapons were used. In this alternate world, an Afro-American "Black Attila" is conquering the remnants of the Western nations, destroyed by the wars. The only remaining stable surviving nations, aside from the African-based Ashanti Empire, are an isolationist Australasian-Japanese Federation, which opposes the Ashanti Empire, and the wealthy Marxist Republic of Bantustan, formerly known as South Africa which is led by its Indian-born President Mahatma Gandhi; having never known apartheid or hostilities between the British and the Boers, it is a wealthy, pacifist utopia, in which there is no racial tension.
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Wikipedia