[The Land Leviathan] is a fantasy about how, in an alternative twentieth century, Black Power finally ends up ruling the world. Stated thus the story would sound to have, if not high seriousness, then at least a compelling tendency towards significance. Its effect is very different, however, being at the same time vivid and wayward. This arbitrariness is the fault of Michael Moorcock's chosen mode of narration: as the sequel to The War Lord of the Air the book is presented as the personal diary of one Captain Oswald Bastable, a soldierly adventurer of the late nineteenth century in the tradition of those English travellers whose lack of imagination was to be transmuted into fearlessness or eccentricity by a later age. Mr Moorcock does this well: he has managed a stylish pastiche of those first-person accounts of adventure on the fringes of the Raj. But the style has its own fatal consequences in that the narrator—half naive, half secure in his Britishness—seems to wander through the story while things happen around him in a haphazard and patternless way. He makes sense of nothing, and can but turn it all into a rip-roaring yarn.

It is all a harmless fable, and, discounting mild irony, quite lacking in import. Captain Bastable's vacillations about whether to side with the Whites or the Blacks are typical of his class and type, evincing nothing but uneasy humanitarianism. This is no mode for viewing anything, much less world cataclysm; and because Bastable takes no properly reasoned stand and because his narrative is the book, The Land Leviathan is nothing more than the romance its subtitle modestly claims it to be.