Oswald Bastable

Oswald Bastable
Created by	Michael Moorcock, inspired by E. Nesbit
Information
Gender	Male
Nationality	English

Oswald Bastable is a fictional character created by Michael Moorcock. He is the protagonist in The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan, The Steel Tsar, and appears in other stories too.

E. Nesbit created Oswald Bastable and his four siblings in the 1890s and featured them in numerous children's adventure stories narrated by Oswald (not to be confused with the children's fantasy adventures, Five Children and It and its sequels). Many Bastable stories were first published in magazines, not plainly as serial novels, but they are now known from the three episodic novels The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), New Treasure Seekers (1904). Four more Bastable stories are in the collection Oswald Bastable and Others (1905).

Moorcock stated on the forums of his website that his use of the name "Oswald Bastable" was not supposed to directly link his character with Nesbit's (i.e. to make his novels into sequels). Rather, he said that he was trying to connect with a particular "Fabian 'liberal' imperialism, still fundamentally paternalistic but well-meaning" which he felt belonged to Nesbit's era. Edith Nesbit, who originally created the Bastable character, and her husband Hubert Bland, had been among the founders and leading members of the Fabian Society - whose proclaimed aim was to eventually get to Socialism, but in a gradual non-revolutionary way. It can be said that in practice this made its members into proponents of a continued, reformed British Empire. Moorcock's Bastable books explore various variants on the theme of Imperialism and Colonialism: the British and other colonial empires persisting into the later 20th Centuries, or conversely collapsing already in the early 1900s, and so on.

...
Wikipedia