The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock

A 288-page reprint of Steampunk Fiction, published by Titan Books

 

When I first read the words “Warlord of the Air”, my first thought was of a Hun-like figure atop a flying pirate ship, brandishing his glittering sword of doom. Luckily, this reprint of fantasy-legend Michael Moorcock’s book was even better than that, if you can imagine. This fantastical tale of adventure set in both the turn of the century as well as an alternate-history 1970’s has everything from mystical hidden temples to the decades-late atomic bomb.

The Warlord of the Air begins with our narrator, Michael Moorcock (supposedly the grandfather of the author by the same name), recounting how he met our protagonist, one Captain Oswald Bastable on the quiet Rowe Island in the year 1904. The man is jilted and opium-ridden, but soon takes a liking to the narrator and relates to him over the course of several days his traumatic and far-fetched story.

The tales starts off with a slightly younger Bastable leading a troop of Indian soldiers to investigate recent attacks, by the Kumbalari warriors, upon a civilian town. They come to the most ancient of all cities, Teku Benga, which is ruled over by an omnipresent, self-declared, magical king, Sharan Kang. After being drugged in the midst of negotiations, Bastable dictates a series of horrific visions that haunted his mind until he awoke on a desolate plateau, clearly some years after a natural disaster. Upon the brink of losing himself to insanity, he is rescued from his isolation by a massive zeppelin piloted by an English officer/amateur archeologist.

After being taken back to England and being informed that the year is now 1972 rather than 1902, the protagonist of this story takes it surprisingly well and quickly adjusts to his new environment. The British Empire is now the most influential nation in the Great Powers and the world now thrives on technology and the changes brought on by the widely used airships.

Author Michael Moorcock

At this point, Bastable does a stint as an officer aboard the luxury air-ship liner, Loch Etive, but is thrown out of the army after assaulting a passenger (with very good reason, I might add). Distraught and in a drunken stupor, he is offered employment aboard a rickety old cargo airship, The Rover, and somehow finds himself part of an anarchistic, socialistic crew. Fighting the idea of communism and revolutionists, he eventually comes to realize that they’re not all bad and, in fact, changes his views on everything he once believed to be true.

The story ends with a battle and a BOOM! During which Bastable is shuttled backwards through time, finding himself once again in the year 1904, though everything is not as it had been.

The Warlord of the Air is terrifically written with a very Victorian sound to it without feeling forced, like so many period novels do when written so long after the time in which they take place. Moorcock managed to turn out not only an exciting action/adventure tale with a lovably tragic hero, but a social commentary in which he cleverly injects his own views in the context of a world we might have known. The only problem I had with the writing style of this otherwise excellent novel was the pacing. The first one hundred pages are entirely different in tone and context than the next one hundred, as are the last fifty pages from the rest.

The 1971 cover to The Warlord of the Air by Ace Books

This reprint (released on January 15th, 2013) features a cover very different from its previous incarnations, such as the 1971 and 1974 covers by Ace Books, both of which feature weaponized airships floating along through ominous-looking clouds, all in very yellowy tones. This most recent cover is a flat shade of electric blue with a line-drawing of a zeppelin taking up only a small portion of the image. Moorcock’s name is emblazoned across it, larger than even the book title. At the bottom of the book it is noted that this is the first novel in a trilogy known as the Nomad of the Time Streams novels. Moorcock had two more novels succeeding The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan & The Steel Tsar being re-released from Titan Books on April 16th & August 13th respectively.

The foreword, written by Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, Time and Relative), praises the author’s understanding of his great dystopian (or as he calls them, Scientific Romancers) predecessors such as H.G. Wells, E. Nesbit, and Rudyard Kipling, and I couldn’t agree more. It is much shorter than one would expect in a foreword, and while I would have liked to hear him elaborate more on the links between Moorcock and authors like the above, I think perhaps it’s best to leave it to the imagination. Overall I must give this wonderful reprint of The Warlord of the Air a might 9 out of 10.