The Land Leviathan

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The Land Leviathan
Dust-jacket from the first edition
Author	Michael Moorcock
Cover artist	Chris Foss
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Oswald Bastable
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Quartet
Publication date	1974
Media type	Print (Hardback and Paperback)
Pages	161 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-704-32018-5
Preceded by	The Warlord of the Air
Followed by	The Steel Tsar

The Land Leviathan is a novel by Michael Moorcock [1]. Originally subtitled "A New Scientific Romance", it has been seen as an early steampunk novel, dealing with an alternative British Imperial history dominated by airships and futuristic warfare. It is a sequel to The Warlord of the Air and is also published in the compilation volume A Nomad of the Time Streams.

The story of Oswald Bastable's continuing adventures "trapped forever in the shifting tides of time" is framed with the conceit of the book being a long lost manuscript, as related by Moorcock's grandfather. The elder Moorcock travels to China in an attempt to track down Bastable, meeting Una Persson of the Jerry Cornelius novels on the way.

Bastable's story takes in a post-apocalyptic twentieth century, where Western Europe and the United States have been devastated by accelerated technological change, which led to a prolonged global war, causing their reversion to barbarism and savagery. By contrast, South Africa is ruled by Gandhi, apartheid never happened, and is an oasis of civilisation, as are an independent China and India, which stayed out of the conflict, and are affluent, technologically advanced nations in this alternate, anti-imperialist twentieth century. To restore civilisation and social order in the afflicted Northern Hemisphere, a 'Black Attila' leads an African army to beneficent if paternalist conquest of Europe and an apocalyptic war against the United States featuring the "vast, moving ziggurat of destruction" of the title.

Martin Wisse noted that the book "is quite obviously a commentary on the "yellow peril" and "black peril" novel of the late 19th and early 20th century, with its unthinking racism, love of superweapons and willingness to commit genocide of the "lesser races". Here the formula is inverted, and the sympathies of the writer and reader are with Gandhi and the "Black Attila", shown as a genuinely good man." They are contrasted with the impoverished, tribalised white supremacists of the devastated former United States, which has reintroduced African American slavery.

It was first published in 1974 and has remained in print, in various editions, ever since.