A Nomad of the Time Streams

Did You Know?

• The omnibus edition was first published in 1982 by the Science Fiction Book Club as The Nomad of Time.
• Portions of the series were significantly rewritten for the 1992 edition.
• Golancz published it as The Nomad of Time in 2014.

Plot

In the first book, The Warlord of the Air, Bastable is transported to an alternate late-20th century Earth where the European powers did not stir each other into a World War. The mighty airships of a British Empire on which the sun never sets are threatened by colonized peoples trying to break free, supported by anarchist and socialist Western saboteurs, and led by a Chinese general whose country is still nominally under Western control and ravaged by civil war. In The Land Leviathan, Bastable visits an alternate 1904 in which most of the Western world has been devastated by a short, terrible war fought with futuristic devices and biological weapons. An Afro-American "Black Attila" conquers the remnants of the Western nations. The only remaining stable surviving nations are an isolationist Australasian-Japanese Federation, the African-based Ashanti Empire, and the wealthy Marxist Republic of Bantustan, formerly known as South Africa, led by its Indian-born president Mahatma Gandhi; it is a pacifist utopia with no racial tension. In the final book, The Steel Tsar, Bastable witnesses an alternate 1941 where Great Britain and Germany became allies around the turn of the 20th century, so neither the War of 1914 nor the October Revolution took place. In this world's Russian Empire, a more stable and democratic nation than the real Russia, Bastable encounters a terrorist group seeking to install a theocracy led by the religious fanatic Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.