The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  A NOMAD OF THE TIME STREAMS

  The Warlord of the Air

  The Steel Tsar (August 2013)

  A NOMAD OF THE TIME STREAMS NOVEL

  THE SECOND ADVENTURE

  THE LAND LEVIATHAN

  A NEW SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Land Leviathan

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781161463

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781161494

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: April 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 © 1974, 2013 by Michael Moorcock.

  Introduction copyright © 1993, 2013 by Michael Moorcock.

  Foreword copyright © 2013 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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  To the Memory of

  Steve Biko, Malcolm X, and Mongezi Feza

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Intro

  Prologue: In Search of Oswald Bastable

  Book One: The World in Anarchy

  Chapter 1: The Return to Teku Benga

  Chapter 2: The Dream—and the Nightmare— of the Chilean Wizard

  Chapter 3: The Polish Privateer

  Chapter 4: The King of East Grinstead

  Chapter 5: The Start of a New Career

  Chapter 6: “A Haven of Civilization”

  Chapter 7: A Legend in the Flesh

  Chapter 8: A Decision in Cold Blood

  Book Two: The Battle for Washington

  Chapter 1: The Two Fleets Meet

  Chapter 2: The Land Leviathan

  Chapter 3: The Deserter

  Chapter 4: The Triumphant Beast

  Chapter 5: A Matter of Loyalties

  Epilogue

  Editor’s Note

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  First 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

  INTRODUCTION

  My grandfather, who died relatively young after he had volunteered for service in the Great War, became increasingly secretive and misanthropic in his last years so that the discovery of a small steel safe amongst his effects was unsurprising and aroused no curiosity whatsoever in his heirs who, finding that they could not unlock it (no key ever came to light), simply stored it away with his papers and forgot about it. The safe remained in the attic of our Yorkshire house for the best part of fifty years and doubtless would still be there if it had not been for my discovery of the manuscript which I published a couple of years ago under the title The Warlord of the Air. After the book was published I received many interesting letters from people asking me if it was merely a piece of fiction or if the story had come into my hands as I had described. I, of course, believed Bastable’s story (and my grandfather’s) completely, yet sometimes felt quite as frustrated as my grandfather had done when he had tried to get people to share his belief, and I couldn’t help brooding occasionally on the mystery of the young man’s disappearance after those long hours spent talking to my grandfather on Rowe Island in the early years of the century. As it turn
ed out, I was soon to find myself in possession of, for me, the best possible proof of my grandfather’s veracity, if not of Bastable’s.

  I spent this past summer in Yorkshire, where we have a house overlooking the moors of the West Riding, and, having little to do but go for long walks and enjoy the pleasures of rock climbing, I took to looking through the rest of my grandfather’s things, coming at length upon the old steel safe jammed in a corner under the eaves of one of our innumerable attics. The safe was hidden behind the moulting remains of a stuffed timber wolf which had used to terrify me as a child, and perhaps that was the reason why I had not previously found it. As I pushed the beast aside, his dusty glass eyes seemed to glare at me with hurt dignity and he toppled slowly sideways and fell with a muffled crash into a heap of yellowing newspapers which another of my relatives, for reasons of his own, had once thought worth preserving. It was as if the wolf had been guarding the safe since the beginning of Time, and I had a slight feeling of invading hallowed ground, much as some booty-hunting Victorian archaeologist must have felt as he chipped his way into the tomb of a dead Egyptian king!

  The safe was about eighteen inches deep and a couple of feet high, made of thick steel. The outside had grown a little rusty and the handle would not budge when I tried it. I hunted about the house for spare keys which might fit the lock, finding the best part of a score of keys, but none which would open the safe. By now my curiosity was fully whetted and I manhandled the safe downstairs and took it into my workshop where I tried to force it. All I succeeded in doing was to break two or three chisels and ruin the blades of my hacksaw, so eventually I had to telephone a specialist locksmith in Leeds and ask for expert help in opening the thing. I was pessimistically certain that the safe would contain only some out-of-date share certificates or nothing at all, but I knew I should not be able to rest until it was opened. The locksmith came, eventually, and it took him only a short while to get the safe undone.

  I remember the rather sardonic look he offered me as the contents were displayed for the first time in almost sixty years. It was plain that he thought I had wasted my money, for there were no family treasures here, merely a pile of closely written foolscap sheets, beginning to show their age. The handwriting was not even my grandfather’s and I experienced a distinct sinking sensation, for obviously I had hoped to find notes which would tell me more about Bastable and my grandfather’s experiences after he had set off for China to seek the Valley of the Morning, where he had guessed Bastable to be.

  As he left, the locksmith gave me what I guessed to be a pitying look and said that his firm would be sending the bill along later. I sighed, made myself a pot of coffee, and then sat down to leaf through the sheets.

  Only then did I realize that I had found something even more revealing than anything I had hoped to discover (and, it emerged, even more mystifying!)—for these notes were Bastable’s own. Here, written in his hand, was an account of his experiences after he had left my grandfather—there was even a brief note addressed to him from Bastable:

  Moorcock. I hope this reaches you. Make of it what you will. I’m going to try my luck again. This time if I am not successful I doubt I shall have the courage to continue with my life (if it is mine).

  Yours—Bastable

  Attached to this were some sheets in my grandfather’s flowing handwriting and these I reproduce in the body of the text, making it the first section.

  This first section is self-explanatory. There is little I need to add at all. You may read the rest for yourself and make up your own mind as to its authenticity.

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Ladbroke Grove

  London

  January 1971

  PROLOGUE

  In Search of Oswald Bastable

  If I were ever to write a book of travel, no matter how queer the events it described, I am sure I would never have the same trouble placing it with a publisher as I had when I tried to get into print Oswald Bastable’s strange tale of his visit to the future in the year 1973. People are not alarmed by the unusual so long as it is placed in an acceptable context. A book describing as fact the discovery of a race of four-legged, three-eyed men of abnormal intelligence and supernatural powers who live in Thibet would probably be taken by a large proportion of the public as absolutely credible. Similarly, if I had dressed up Bastable’s story as fiction I am certain that critics would have praised me for my rich imagination and that a reasonably wide audience would have perused it in a couple of summer afternoons and thought it a jolly exciting read for the money, then promptly forgotten all about it.

  Perhaps it is what I should have done, but, doubtless irrationally, I felt that I had a duty to Bastable to publish his account as it stood.

  I could, were I trying to make money with my pen, write a whole book, full of sensational anecdotes, concerning my travels in China—a country divided by both internal and external pressures, where the only real law can be found in the territories leased to various foreign powers, and where a whole variety of revolutionists and prophets of peculiar political and religious sects squabble continuously for a larger share of that vast and ancient country; but my object is not to make money from Bastable’s story. I merely think it is up to me to keep my word to him and do my best to put it before the public.

  Now that I have returned home, with some relief, to England, I have become a little more optimistic about China’s chances of saving herself from chaos and foreign exploitation. There has been the revolution resulting in the deposing of the last of the Manchus and the setting up of a republic under Sun Yat-sen, who seems to be a reasonable and moderate leader, a man who has learned a great deal from the political history of Europe and yet does not seem content just to ape the customs of the West. Possibly there is hope for China now. However, it is not my business here to speculate upon China’s political future, but to record how I traveled to the Valley of the Morning, following Bastable’s somewhat vague description of its location. I had gathered that it lay somewhere in Shantung province and to the north of Wuchang (which, itself, of course, is in Hupeh). My best plan was to go as directly as possible to Shantung and then make my way inland. I consulted all the atlases and gazetteers, spoke to friends who had been missionaries in that part of China, and got a fairly clear idea of where I might find the valley, if it existed at all.

  Yet I was still reluctant to embark upon what was likely to be a long and exhausting expedition. For all that I had completely believed Bastable, I had no evidence at all to substantiate my theory that he had gone back to the Valley of the Morning, which, by 1973, would contain the Utopian city built by General Shaw, the Warlord of the Air, and called Chi’ng Che’eng Ta-Chia (or, in English, roughly Democratic Dawn City). Even if he had gone there—and found nothing—he could easily have disappeared into the vastness of the Asian continent and as easily have perished in one of the minor wars or uprisings which constantly ravaged those poor and strife-ridden lands.

  Therefore I continued to lead my conventional life, putting the whole perplexing business of Captain Bastable as far into the back of my mind as possible, although I would patiently send his original manuscript to a fresh publisher every time it came back from the last. I also sent a couple of letters to The Times in the hope that my story of my meeting with Bastable would attract the attention of that or some other newspaper, but the letters were never published. Neither, it seemed, were any of the popular monthlies, like the Strand, interested, for all that their pages were full of wild and unlikely predictions of what the future was bound to hold for us. I even considered writing to Mr. H.G. Wells, whose books Anticipations and The Discovery of the Future created such a stir a few years ago, but Mr. Wells, whom I understood to be a full-blooded socialist, would probably have found Bastable’s story too much out of sympathy with his views and would have ignored me as cheerfully as anyone else. I did draft a letter, but finally did not send it.

  It was about this time that it was brought to my attention that I
was beginning to earn a reputation as something of a crank. This was a reputation I felt I could ill afford and it meant that I was forced, at last, to come to a decision. I had been noticing, for several months, a slightly odd atmosphere at my London club. People I had known for years, albeit only acquaintances, seemed reluctant to pass the time of day with me, and others would sometimes direct looks at me which were downright cryptic. I was not particularly bothered by any of this, but the mystery, such as it was, was finally made clear to me by an old friend of mine who was, himself, a publisher, although he concentrated entirely on poetry and novels and so I had never had occasion to submit Bastable’s manuscript to him. He knew of it, however, and had initially been able to give me the names of one or two publishers who might have been interested. Now, however, he approached me in the library of the club where, after lunch, I had gone to read for half-an-hour. He attracted my attention with a discreet cough.

  “Hope you don’t mind me interrupting, Moorcock.”

  “Not at all.” I indicated a nearby chair. “As a matter of fact I wanted a word with you, old boy. I’m still having trouble placing that manuscript I mentioned...”

  He ignored my offer of a chair and remained standing.

  “That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been meaning to speak to you for a month or two now, but to tell you the truth I’ve had no idea how to approach you. This must sound like damned interference and I’d be more than grateful if you would take what I have to say in the spirit it’s meant.”

  He looked extraordinarily embarrassed, squirming like a schoolboy. I even thought I detected the trace of a blush on his cheeks.

  I laughed.

  “You’re making me extremely curious, old man. What is it?”