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Book: The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) by Michael Moorcock
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Authors: Michael Moorcock
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Blighty for some time, I shouldn’t wonder, sir. Most of Europe is in a far worse plight than Asia, having sustained the greatest concentration of bombs. The war is over in Europe, Captain Bastable. Here, it continues—a sort of alternative battle-ground, you might call it, with precious little for anyone to win. The power situation is grim enough— there’s probably not one British keel capable of lifting, even if it exists...”
Now his words had become completely meaningless to me. I was aware of only one terrifying fact and I had become filled with despair: this world of 1904 bore even less relation to my own world than the one from which I had sought to escape. I begged the sergeant to explain recent history to me as he might explain it to a child, using my old excuse of partial amnesia. The man accepted the excuse and kindly gave me a breakdown of this world’s history since the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It was radically different either from your world, Moorcock or from the world of the future I described to you.
It appears that, by the 1870s, in Chile of all places, there had emerged the genius who had, in a few short years, been responsible for altering the lot of the world’s poor, of providing plenty where once there had been famine, comfort where they had been only grinding misery. His name was Manuel O’Bean, the son of an Irish engineer who had settled in Chile and the Chilean heiress Esmé Piatnitski (perhaps the wealthiest woman in South or Central America). O’Bean had shown signs of an enormous capacity to learn and to invent at an extraordinarily young age. His father, needless to say, had encouraged him and O’Bean had learned everything his father could pass on by the time he was eight years old. With the resources made available by his mother’s wealth, O’Bean had nothing to thwart this flowering of his mechanical genius. By the time he was twelve he had invented a whole new range of mining equipment which, when applied to his family’s holdings, increased their wealth a hundred-fold. Not only did he have an enormous talent for planning and building new types of machine, he also had the ability to work out new power sources which were less wasteful and infinitely cheaper than the crude sources up to that time in use. He developed a method of converting and reconverting electricity so that it did not need to be carried through wires but could be transmitted by means of rays to almost anywhere in the world from any other point. His generators were small, efficient and required the minimum of power, and these in turn propelled most of the types of machinery he invented. Other engines, including sophisticated forms of steam-turbine depending on fast-heating liquids other than water, were also developed. As well as the mining and farming equipment he developed in those early years, O’Bean (still less than fifteen years old) invented a collection of highly efficient war-machines (he was still a boy and was fascinated, as boys are, with such things), including underwater boats, mobile cannons, airships (in collaboration with the great flying expert, the Frenchman La Perez) and self-propelled armoured carriages sometimes called “land ironclads”. However, O’Bean soon abandoned this line of research as his social conscience developed. By the time he was eighteen he had sworn never to put his genius to war-like purposes again and instead concentrated on machines which would irrigate deserts, tame forests, and turn the whole world into an infinitely rich garden which would feed the hungry and thus extinguish what he believed to be the wellspring of most human strife.
By the beginnings of the new century, therefore, it seemed that Utopia had been achieved. There was not one person in the world who was not well-nourished and did not have the opportunity to receive a good education. Poverty had been abolished almost overnight.
Man can live by bread alone when all his energies are
Now his words had become completely meaningless to me. I was aware of only one terrifying fact and I had become filled with despair: this world of 1904 bore even less relation to my own world than the one from which I had sought to escape. I begged the sergeant to explain recent history to me as he might explain it to a child, using my old excuse of partial amnesia. The man accepted the excuse and kindly gave me a breakdown of this world’s history since the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It was radically different either from your world, Moorcock or from the world of the future I described to you.
It appears that, by the 1870s, in Chile of all places, there had emerged the genius who had, in a few short years, been responsible for altering the lot of the world’s poor, of providing plenty where once there had been famine, comfort where they had been only grinding misery. His name was Manuel O’Bean, the son of an Irish engineer who had settled in Chile and the Chilean heiress Esmé Piatnitski (perhaps the wealthiest woman in South or Central America). O’Bean had shown signs of an enormous capacity to learn and to invent at an extraordinarily young age. His father, needless to say, had encouraged him and O’Bean had learned everything his father could pass on by the time he was eight years old. With the resources made available by his mother’s wealth, O’Bean had nothing to thwart this flowering of his mechanical genius. By the time he was twelve he had invented a whole new range of mining equipment which, when applied to his family’s holdings, increased their wealth a hundred-fold. Not only did he have an enormous talent for planning and building new types of machine, he also had the ability to work out new power sources which were less wasteful and infinitely cheaper than the crude sources up to that time in use. He developed a method of converting and reconverting electricity so that it did not need to be carried through wires but could be transmitted by means of rays to almost anywhere in the world from any other point. His generators were small, efficient and required the minimum of power, and these in turn propelled most of the types of machinery he invented. Other engines, including sophisticated forms of steam-turbine depending on fast-heating liquids other than water, were also developed. As well as the mining and farming equipment he developed in those early years, O’Bean (still less than fifteen years old) invented a collection of highly efficient war-machines (he was still a boy and was fascinated, as boys are, with such things), including underwater boats, mobile cannons, airships (in collaboration with the great flying expert, the Frenchman La Perez) and self-propelled armoured carriages sometimes called “land ironclads”. However, O’Bean soon abandoned this line of research as his social conscience developed. By the time he was eighteen he had sworn never to put his genius to war-like purposes again and instead concentrated on machines which would irrigate deserts, tame forests, and turn the whole world into an infinitely rich garden which would feed the hungry and thus extinguish what he believed to be the wellspring of most human strife.
By the beginnings of the new century, therefore, it seemed that Utopia had been achieved. There was not one person in the world who was not well-nourished and did not have the opportunity to receive a good education. Poverty had been abolished almost overnight.
Man can live by bread alone when all his energies are
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