Fantastic Metropolis

Phase One

Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air begins a trilogy of novels that feature the protagonist Oswald Bastable, who we find as a captain in the 53rd Lancers in Edwardian India, policing the northern frontier, attempting to negotiate a peace with an insurrectionist local King. When the labyrinthine temple that he negotiates in is destroyed in an earthquake, Bastable finds himself removed from his time and place, becoming a ‘Nomad of the Time Streams’. The world he enters is an alternate 1973, where the British Empire never ended.

As William Hardesty has noted, Oswald Bastable is not a character invented by Moorcock. He was “‘a very manly boy’ concerned with ‘the honour of the House of Bastable’” in two novels by Victorian novelist E. Nesbit. Moorcock appropriates and re-invents Bastable as an adult: conventional, priggish, and unbothered by self-reflection or anxiety. Bastable, the epitome of Edwardian England, is a version of the Visitor to utopia, and when he is rescued from the ruined temple, he finds a world of high-speed airships (from Kipling’s “With the Night Mail”); “tall white buildings rising up and up, storey upon storey, so that it seemed they almost touched the clouds” (49); and a Pax Britannica. Hardesty suggests that it is the unacknowledged inequalities of this peaceful and static Empire which is the locus of Warlord’s narrative:

The major conflicts in the novels arise because the new technologies have created apparent Utopias without solving the real problems of worldwide freedom, equality, and social justice. These utopias are capitalistic and prosperous, but their benefits extend only to the privileged; the great majorities of the world’s population — the uneducated, the non-white, the poor — have little share in the leisure and the goods of the comfortable. Consequently, forces are in motion to upset — even destroy — the technological elite and provide a free and just world, based on the same advances but distributing the fruits to all. (106)

While this certainly describes the explicit ideological focus of The Warlord of the Air, my argument in this paper is that Moorcock goes one step further: that these novels inhabit the discursive and textual structures of fictions from the late Victorian and Edwardian period in order to disrupt them from within. Hardesty notes the extensive textual borrowings from Conrad, but the utopian worlds revealed through Bastable’s adventures also call up H.G. Wells. The utopian and dystopian fiction of this period is revealed, through Moorcock’s inhabitation of its discourses, as itself implicated in the colonial project.

Moorcock, I would argue, is one of the great re-writers of modern fiction, and is particularly fascinated by the writers of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Some of his re-writings have greater ideological and textual weight than others. Where the Elric series re-invested the fantasy genre with a rather anxious masculine subjectivity, and the Dancers at the End of Time novels are a celebration of the literature of the fin-de-siècle, the Nomads trilogy, and the thematically linked Cornelius and Pyat series, are interventions in British culture and history. Pastiche here is ideologically deployed, becoming what in post-colonial theory has been called ‘mimicry’. Elleke Boehmer suggests that “Mimickers reflected back to colonizer [sic] a distorted image of his world; they undercut his categories of perception” (172-3). She continues:

Though ventriloquising the coloniser’s voice, though identifying themselves in the vocabulary of their oppression, they also mixed up and upturned dominant meanings. Their cleaving to colonial definitions of self was therefore at the same time a cleaving from. (173)

Though there is great debate in this field about the possibility of colonial subjects to appropriate and inhabit the language and discourse of the colonizer, the idea of “mimicry” is a suggestive one for an insurgent textual politics. Opposition is found within the aporias of the coloniser’s discourse rather than in attempting to find an “authentic” voice or language outside of that of the coloniser. Moorcock inhabits colonial fictions to expose their ideological and cultural limits.

The Warlord of the Air begins on Rowe Island, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The narrator catalogues, for well over two pages, the topography of the island, its shape and aspect, and the buildings which indicate social and racial difference:

Built around the harbour is a largish town which, as you approach it, resembles nothing so much as a prosperous Devon village — until you see the Malay and Chinese buildings behind the facades of the hotels and offices which line the quayside. […] Further up the hill you can see the workings of the mines which employ the greatest part of the population, which is Malay and Chinese labourers and their wives and families. Prominent on the quayside are the warehouses and offices of the Welland Rock Phosphate Mining Company and the great white and gold façade of the Royal Harbour Hotel. (8)

The gaze of the narrator is situated in a position of omniscience, observing, and through detailed description, controlling the representation of the island and its inhabitants. An island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is described in terms of a Devonian fishing village, its likeness yet difference identified by the comparison. A rigid demarcation of social space is signified by the physical space of the harbour. The quayside is dominated by commercial buildings and a hotel run for and by Western interests and visitors. The Chinese and Malay are placed in a position of subjugation, “behind” and dominated by the space of colonial administration and exploitation. Ironically, they are themselves imported, non-indigenous peoples, implicated in the colonial project yet dominated by it. They have no voice: they are placed at the margins of the physical space of the island, and its discursive and ideological apparatus.

The narratorial eye and voice maps and fixes the physical space of Rowe Island. Elleke Boehmer has suggested that the system of representation in colonial texts itself is implicated in the processes of power:

An important tenet of colonial discourse theory […] would hold that empire was governed as much by symbolism as by real distinctions in the world, which is to say, because colonial authority expressed its dominance in part through medium of representation [sic], a colonialist work of imagination functioned as an instrument of power. (51)

The Nomad trilogy expresses the representational power of colonialist discourse by inhabiting the fictional forms of empire, most particularly the “adventure” narrative and the dystopia. Rowe Island is in a “blank” area of ocean, just as was Moreau’s island. Both are off the map. The narrator of Warlord says of Rowe Island: “It has no business to be where it is. There is nothing near it. There is nothing to indicate that it is there.” (7). The island is No-place, somewhere outside of the spatially contained ‘real’. Like More’s Utopia, an island found on the other side of the globe, Rowe Island is removed in space from the “known”, the mapped and controlled (imaginatively, ideologically and commercially). The Warlord of the Air deploys these signs of the dystopian text to disrupt them. More’s Utopia was written in the age of “discovery”, the beginning of the mapping and seizure of distant parts of the globe for commercial and political ends, and in its conception of a “blank space” itself is in unacknowledged discursive alignment with colonialism. For the very idea of the “blank space” is one that erases, or renders invisible, what is there: the indigenous peoples and their own culture and society. This passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness exposes the complicity of cartography with colonialism:

‘Now, when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.’ (11)

The space of utopia was the space of ‘discovery’, or, in other words, of colonial expansion and exploitation. The adventure narrative of the Victorian and Edwardian era itself re-imagines the era of ‘discovery’ as one of anxiety for the white Imperialist, the subject who suffers despair, degradation and defeat in the margins of Empire.

Franco Moretti, in his recent book Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, offers an entertaining and illuminating set of analyses of novels and stories of the nineteenth century, illustrated by and generated by maps. He writes, as a theoretical justification for his project:

[W]hat do literary maps allow us to see? Two things, basically. Firstly, they highlight the ortgebunden, place-bound nature of literary forms: each of them with its peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes. And then, maps bring to light the internal logic of narrative: the semiotic domain around which the plot coalesces and self-organises. (5)

The maps in Moretti’s book are fascinating in what they reveal, but his cartographic method is compromised. As Ania Loomba notes, “Maps claim to be objective and scientific, but in fact select what they record and present in specific ways, which are historically tied with colonial enterprises” (78). As an analytical tool for the literary critic, then, maps must be treated with caution, as a translation of a text into these terms will impose its own discursive limits. Maps are not neutral, a blank space of textual criticism. However, the relationship of Moorcock’s Nomads trilogy — The Warlord of the Air (1971), The Land Leviathan (1974) and The Steel Tsar (1981) — to the space of the British Empire is intriguing. The Warlord of the Air begins on Rowe Island, but the narrative of Oswald Bastable begins on the frontiers of Northern India, traverses London, the West coast of the United States, the Pacific, Sydney, Calcutta, Saigon, China, then ultimately Hiroshima. As we see, however, although Bastable overflies Empire, his circumnavigation of the globe largely avoids Britain’s colonies entirely. The Warlord of the Air begins on the borders of Empire, in northern India. Its topographical structures narrate journeys from margin to centre and back again, inhabiting the discourses of destabilisation which recur so often in invasion narratives of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The Land Leviathan, ironically, takes place largely at sea. It displaces the centre to Mohandas Gandhi’s utopian “Bantustan”, a South African state of peace, prosperity and multi-racial harmony. Bastable’s journey to Britain here reveals only degeneration, violence, and despair. The Steel Tsar avoids the centre altogether, its topographies including the Russian steppe, Rowe Island, and Indonesia. Although these novels can be taken as a meditation upon, and a re-imagination of, the British Empire and Empire fictions, this can only take place outside the spatial and imaginative confines of Empire itself. These novels of “alternate history” both call up the generic marks of science fiction and invasion narratives, but exceed them both discursively and spatially.

Phase Two

The Warlord of the Air actually begins not on Rowe Island, but with a note by the “Editor,” Michael Moorcock. It reads:

I never met my grandfather Michael Moorcock and knew very little of him until my grandmother’s death last year when I was given a box of his papers by my father. ‘These seem to be more in your line than mine,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know we had another scribbler in the family.’ Most of the papers were diaries, the beginnings of essays and short stories, some conventional Edwardian poetry — and a typewritten manuscript which, without further comment, we publish here, perhaps a little later than he would have hoped. (4)

The “author” of The Warlord of the Air, Michael Moorcock, is displaced into the position of textual editor, a venerable literary device which figuratively attempts to verify the historical or textual authenticity of the narrative while decentering the authority of the “author”. We find a further collapse onto “Michael Moorcock”, the grandfather and alter ego of the novelist, and who stands in for him in both The Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan. The narrator who describes Rowe Island is not Bastable, but Moorcock the grandfather, and it is to him that Bastable tells his (tall) tale. The compromising nature of the colonial representation is not bracketed off as Bastable’s own, but is deliberately situated as that of “Moorcock”. In The Land Leviathan, Bastable’s narrative is preceded by a long sequence in which grandfather Moorcock travels to China to receive Bastable’s new manuscript from Una Persson, another Nomad of the Time Streams who features largely in the Cornelius stories. One of Michael Moorcock’s “fictional” characters then appears in the “real” framing text, again destabilising the ontological status of the document. In The Steel Tsar, it is the “author” Michael Moorcock who is visited in his 70s flat by Una Persson, again disrupting the textual and extra-textual. Rather than being what William Hardesty characterises as a series of literary jokes and games, these textual disruptions have a clear ideological purpose.

The three books each constitute “alternate histories” of Empire. The “alternate history” differs in each of the books. In The Warlord of the Air, the British Empire still reigns in 1973, though forces are working to undermine it. In The Land Leviathan, the mechanical wonders created by a boy-inventor called O’Bean — a figure straight from pulp scientifiction — have resulted in a 1904 wracked by global mechanised carnage, and narrates the final defeat of white America by the “Black Attila”, one General Hood. The Steel Tsar narrates the struggles of an alternate Stalin to overthrow a Russian republic still governed by Kerensky. What dominates each book is the disintegration and collapse of a centralised governmental authority, consecutively versions of the British Empire, American neo-Imperialism, and the Soviet Union. Each subsequent book is a re-writing of the last, and The Steel Tsar ends with Bastable piloting another airship towards the “ship yards” of Hiroshima. This had been the climactic event of The Warlord of the Air: Bastable is coerced into piloting an airship which drops the NFB (nuclear fission bomb) on Hiroshima in 1973. Just as the textual fabric of the trilogy does not allow “Moorcock” to assume a place of neutrality with regard to colonial discourse, Bastable cannot achieve a neutral space of observation, and becomes an Everyman who assumes the responsibility of “our” Hiroshima.

In The Land Leviathan, Bastable comes to an understanding of the nature of the catastrophe:

I think it was then that the notion first occurred to me that perhaps I had been selected by Providence to be involved in a countless series of what might be called alternative versions of the Apocalypse — that I was doomed to witness the end of the world over and over again and doomed, too, to search for a world where Man had learned to control the impulses which led to such suicidal conflicts, perhaps never to find it. I still do not quite understand my motives in recording my experiences, but it could be that I hope that, if they are ever read, they will serve as a lesson to a world which has so far managed to avert its own destruction. (307)

In this passage, while seeming to invoke a didactic reading of the trilogy, the text disrupts Bastable’s own subjectivity and self-identity: “I still do not quite understand my own motives”. The Nomads novels clearly re-write each other — characters recur, such as the airship/sea Captain Korzeniowski, Una Persson, Michael Dempsey — and they also re-write “our” history. Korzeniowski is a version of Conrad, and Joe Kennedy, Gandhi, and Ronald Reagan all make cameo appearances. The “alternative Apocalypse” which Bastable’s act invokes is, of course, one already visited upon “our” world. The texts replay similar events in different forms — the fraying of Empire, the rise of opposition, the calcifying of this opposition into an alternative tyranny, the failure yet necessity of anarchy — reveal an understanding of history not as cyclical, but as eternal and concurrent.

The entirety of Moorcock’s oeuvre constitutes what is called the “Multiverse”, an interwoven series of parallel universes, all co-existing in time and space. Peter Nicholls notes that “the whole body of [Moorcock’s] work has been made to work retrospectively as a kind of giant, episodic supernovel” (450). The Nomads trilogy was itself re-written, particularly The Steel Tsar, in part to align it more closely with the themes of the Eternal Champion sequence overall. Re-writing, of course, allows previous books to be woven into the fabric of the Multiverse, but again, this has an impulse other than commercial imperatives (the Orion reissue) or neatness. If history can be re-written, perhaps it can be changed.

Textually, Moorcock’s novel sequences repeat the conception of history found in the Nomads trilogy. They represent alternative Apocalypses, re-visions or versions of the same event, re-told. All the central characters in Moorcock’s fiction become versions or avatars of the same figure, all his books re-writings or revisions of other books. As Colin Greenland suggests in The Entropy Exhibition, “[t]he Eternal Champion is a central figure and continuing theme of Moorcock’s work. All his books interlock. People and scene recur, hypnotically” (125). If history is itself a continual series of revisions or re-visions, Moorcock is also a serial re-writer of his own fictions, again compromising a sense of authenticity with regard to text or authorial self-identity. As there is no “History”, there is no “character” or “subject”, and no “author”. There is no “original”, only re-writing. There are only multiple versions in the Multiverse.

By re-writing fictions from the Victorian and Edwardian periods, Moorcock insists that colonial discourse not be simply seen as a historical artefact. The ideological imperatives towards domination and exploitation, the discourses of power and of racism, the struggle between control and freedom, are all co-existent with our own. The Eternal Champion, a figure whose “interminable ethical struggle” (Greenland, 127) is a repository for the last traces of the Heroic, symbolises the necessity of engagement in the struggle, to act ethically even if, like Oswald Bastable, we may not understand our own motives. Bastable is one of the smallest and weakest of the versions of the Eternal Champion, compromised by colonialism and by his complicity in atrocity. Hardly in control of his own subjectivity, let alone fate, Bastable is a man adrift, loose among the time-streams. His struggle to understand the “Nature of the Catastrophe” of his time(s), a trajectory which is mapped onto his global traversals, is finally revealed to be a voyage of self-discovery, like the colonialist texts it draws upon. It also reveals the unacknowledged cultural substrata of post-Imperial Britain. Where Marlow and Kurtz find the heart of darkness, Bastable finds the Multiverse, fluid and unfixed in time and space. It is only in his continued travels, slipping between worlds and exposing the aporias of colonial discourse, that the Bastable sequence reaches some kind of paradoxical resolution.

Works Cited

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford and New York: Oxford, 1995.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1902). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.

Greenland, Colin, The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British New Wave in Science Fiction. London: RKP, 1983.

Hardesty, William H. “A Nomad of the Time Streams: Moorcock’s Oswald Bastable”. Selected Proceedings of the Science Fiction Research Association 1978 National Conference. Cedar Falls, Iowa: University of Northern Iowa, 1978.

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998.

Moorcock, Michael. The Warlord of the Air (1971), collected and revised in A Nomad of the Time Streams. London: Orion, 1996.

—, The Land Leviathan (1974), collected and revised in A Nomad of the Time Streams. London: Orion, 1996

—, The Steel Tsar (1981), collected and revised in A Nomad of the Time Streams. London: Orion, 1996.

Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998.

Nicholl, Peter. “Michael Moorcock”. In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the early Nineteenth Century to the Present day, ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Scriber’s, 1982. pp.449-457.

Copyright © 2002 by Dr. Brian Baker.