X-Nico

A Nomad of the Time Streams

In the first book, Warlord of the Air, Bastable finds himself transported to an alternate late-20th century Earth where the European powers did not stir each other into a World War and in which the mighty airships of a British Empire on which the sun never set are threatened by the rise of new and terrible enemies.

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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 and thus neither a World War nor the October Revolution took place.

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In The Land Leviathan, Bastable visits an alternate 1904 in which most of the Western world has been devastated around the turn of the 20th century by a short, yet terrible war fought with futuristic devices and in which also biological weapons were used.

The Story of the Treasure Seekers

British writer Michael Moorcock later used the character, or at least the name, of Oswald Bastable for the hero and first-person narrator of his trilogy A Nomad of the Time Streams, published from 1971 until 1981, an influence on the nascent genre of steampunk.

see also