About book The Land Leviathan: A New Scientific Romance (1974)
This is more of the same. Homeboy gets transported to a new time, and he KNOWS that he's hanging around with the goodguys. Then, he gets captured by the other side, and he's belligerent--but wait! Then, he realizes that NOW he's with the REAL goodguys! Until he's stolen by someone else, and he's belligerent again, until he realizes that THIS TIME he's with the goodguys! And so on. I think this process happens about five times over the 340 pages of the first two volumes of this series. It gets tedious. Alright, plot synopsis: Michael Moorcock's grandfather (also named Michael Moorcock) travels to China in the attempt to find the time traveler Oswald Bastable, who told him about his first adventures (printed in The Warlord of The Air) years ago before disappearing. Moorcock doesn't manage to find Bastable, but he DOES stumble across a second manuscript written by Bastable, chronicling another of his adventures. (This whole goofy framing of the story takes up a third of the book, and doesn't add anything to the story. Nor does it seem the least bit plausible.) Bastable's actual adventure begins with his return to the temple that originally caused him to be thrown into the time stream. Once again, the temple sends him through time. However, to his dismay, it doesn't send him back to his own time, but sends him to yet another world ravaged by war. In this world, an especially brilliant scientist has invented all sorts of complicated weapons and bombs, and then dedicated himself to designing machines to improve life for the people of Earth, and make everyone's life leisurely and relatively comfortable. But, with all the free time this gave the less wealthy, they began demanding real equality. Then, things get ugly. War breaks out, and diseases ravage the land. The world is a wasteland, and most everyone wants to be on the sea to avoid plagues that have broken out everywhere, and the Afro Samurai...I'm sorry, the 'Black Atilla'...is leading a crusade across the world, conquering areas and enslaving the Caucasians! Bastable ends up in a small Utopia-like country which is ran by President Gandhi, but then Gandhi sends him as a diplomat to work with the Black Atilla. The Black Atilla has decided to take over the USA, using his gigantic digging machine, The Land Leviathan. Of course, once Bastable is with this dude, Bastable learns that he isn't such a bad guy after all, and that he isn't really enslaving people, he's simply giving the Black People positions of slightly greater power and putting White Guys in more menial of tasks. In effect, he is simply switching the power around as a bit of revenge for all the sufferings his people went through. It all ends with a big war and stuff. Bastable is fine, and so is the Black Atilla. And Gandhi is just fine, and charming as ever. If all of this sounds remarkably silly, then I've done a good job of capturing the feeling of the book. I don't know how intentional the silliness is, and perhaps in a much longer book, the storyline could be made more plausible. But the storyline and characters are way, WAY less interesting than the strange world Bastable is stuck in. Superficially, the book seems to be about issues of race. As far as what the book is actually SAYING about race, I don't know. One never gets the feeling that Moorcock condones the actions of Attila--he seems to find this racism less awful than the more extreme racism being exacted by the Caucasians still in the USA (they have reverted to slavery, forcing the Blacks to toil to the point of death). So, apparently, cruel racism is worse than more tolerant racism. Thanks, Moorcock. You really pulled out the philosophy degree for that one. Perhaps I'm being overly harsh on this book. But, despite the short investment of time I made in reading it, I feel like I got ripped off. I put back a copy of The Lies of Locke Lamora to buy this, and now it's going on the Craptastic shelf. Damn you, Moorcock!
Segundo volume da trilogia que se iniciou com o influente Warlord of the Air, neste livro Moorcock volta a trocar as voltas ao capitão Oswald Bastable. Nómada dos fluxos temporais, o aventureiro está condenado a viajar por entre mundos alternativos sem nunca conseguir regressar ao continuum de onde proveio. Crendo regressar ao futuro alternativo onde os dirigíveis libertários implantaram uma república equalitária no meio da China, descobre-se num outro mundo, devastado por uma guerra sem quartel nem fim. Nesta nova linha histórica, as façanhas de um inventor legam ao mundo uma prosperidade jamais vista. A utopia parece, finalmente, ao alcançe da humanidade mas as velhas pulsões cedo se voltam a revelar e as nações, agora prósperas e detentoras de tecnologias inimagináveis, mergulham o planeta numa guerra sem fim. Com a Europa e a América arrasadas sob uma chuva de bombas químicas e biológicas, os resquícios imperiais resignam-se a defender-se dos antigos povos nativos, apanhados no meio de novas potências destrutivas. Restam dois grandes blocos. A oriente, a união Australo-Japonesa mantém-se neutra e prepara-se para a guerra. Em África, um novo império Ashanti unifica a ferro e fogo quase todo o continente e depressa invade as arábias e a europa. Liderado por um tirano sanguinário, descendente de escravos que busca vingar-se das sevícias que a raça branca infligiu aos negros, prepara-se agora para invadir as américas, libertando os negros oprimidos e novamente reduzidos à escravatura pelos decadentes americanos. No que seria a África do Sul, ergue-se um país próspero e benévolo. Liderado por Ghandi, é um farol do que o planeta poderia ser graças ao conhecimento e tecnologia. É ao serviço deste país que Bastable se vai encontrar, após algumas aventuras que o levam a uma Inglaterra devastada pelas bombas e reduzida à barbárie, e se cruzar com piratas submarinos polacos. Como observador, irá participar na invasão Ashanti das Américas, a bordo de uma fragata que irá sobreviver a uma portentosa batalha naval. É aí que se irá deparar com a mais terrível das armas, um leviatã terrestre, fortaleza sobre rodas eriçada com canhões, temível veículo de combate capaz de pôr cobro aos mais valentes exércitos.Na continuidade da estética de Warlord of the Air, tão influente no movimento Steampunk, Moorcock vira-se agora para as histórias de guerra futura com uma homenagem muito óbvia a The Land Ironclad de Wells. O primeiro livro invoca Robur e todas as histórias de aeróstatos de combate. Aqui a guerra é terrena, o futuro alternativo menos distante, e o ar apocalíptico omnipresente. Implacável, Moorcock joga com preconceitos de raça e ideiais imperialistas. As suas vítimas também são vilões, as tiranias necessárias para pacificar um mundo decaído e em ruínas. Mantém sempre no alto um símbolo de utopia pacifista, de base tecnológicas e científica, mas recorda-nos que é preciso lutar contra forças muito obscuras para atingir esse patamar e que nessa guerra todos os valores são abalados. Um subtexto curioso, dentro de uma aventura empolgante onde, fiel ao género que homangeia, as descrições de portentosas batalhas com máquinas de guerra futuristas imperam, sempre dentro do tom retro-futurista da série.
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Adam wrote: "Romance in the old school meaning of it...meaning an adventure of the imagination roughly."yes, now that i'm a little further into it that seems to be what it is- thanx Adam
—Amanda
And so the adventures of Oswald Bastable continue, thrusting him yet again through the barriers of time and into a strange Earth at once familiar and disturbing. The themes and characters we explore are similar to the first volume, featuring at the center yet another Nemo-esque warlord whose methods give our narrator uneasy pause. By the end, we find ourselves liable to agree with Mr. Bastable's suspicion that time is having a laugh at his expense, forcing him to experience history as 'variations on a theme', and not a theme he appreciates reliving.Usually, describing a book like this as 'alternate history' is a malapropism, since 'alternate' means to shift back and forth between things while 'alternative' means 'of a different sort'. So, if we described wind power as an 'alternate energy' to coal, that would mean we would be constantly switching between wind and coal, not replacing one with the other. But in Moorcock's case, both terms are actually applicable, which must be a boon to sci fi fans that have trouble keeping words straight.So, if our theme is 'world-shaking war', the variation here is 'global politics of racism'. There is a certain tension throughout the book because Moorcock presents a lot of genuinely racist characters of different stripes and degrees, and even lets prejudice slip into his narrator's mouth. It's clear that the violence and rhetoric of the Civil Rights Era tickled Moorcock's unyielding imagination, so we get quite a few powerful (and somewhat unsettling) scenes charged with the complexities race dynamics.Moorcock also seemed to take a bit more time with his narrative as compared to the last book, and didn't rely quite as much on bare exposition to carry the story along, which was nice--but as usual with Moorcock, it was a fairly straightforward adventure with some interesting concepts driving it along throughout, but lacking polish and care. Reminds me of this charming episode of Neal Degrasse Tyson's StarTalk where sex researcher Mary Roach talks about the fact that long-term couples experience better sex because they tend to take their time and get lost in the moment, whereas newer couples are often 'going through the motions' of what they think should work. It's the same with writing books, people: don't just go through the motions when you should be in the moment, taking the time to give your narrative the attention it deserves.
—J.G. Keely
Moorcock's meditation on racism and nationalism is obvious and dull. His hero, the dimension-hopping Oswald Bastable, finds himself on an earth where technological advance has unleashed man's basest, most aggressive tendencies, leading to total war on a world-wide scale. The author has plenty of opinions, but hardly a clue as to how to wrap them in a coherent storyline. A few historical personages appear, such as Gandhi as the president of a pacifist country, but they are not used in a way that provides any insight into their characters beyond what everyone already knows (ie, Gandhi was a pacifist). White authors always court disaster when they attempt to write about black rage over slavery and discrimination, and Moorcock embarrasses himself by creating the Black Attila, who crusades to make the earth safe for his people. Finally, Moorcock has the bad habit of setting up a "mysterious situation" whose explanation should be as painfully obvious to his protagonist as it is to the reader. Yet he writes as if nobody can guess what he has planned. For example, during Attila's invasion of America with his irresistable weapons, the evil racists put black people into cages which are mounted atop the walls that encircle their position. What on earth, we are expected to wonder, could they have been placed there for? Then, when it is revealed by our suitably shocked narrator by they are to be used as a human barricade, we are expected to be surprised.I know that Moorcock is capable of crafting a good story, but this isn't one of them
—David Bonesteel
