The Steel Tsar

Oswalt Bastable is at it again - this time sending a manuscript to Michael Moorcock (the author, not his grandfather as in prior volumes of the series) relating his third trip across the multiverse and his second experience with the Hiroshima bomb. We, again, encounter Una Persson and Kozeniwski (the airship captain) but we also see Dempsey (who originally hooked Bastable up with Kozeniwski) and Elric in the name of Max von Bek who (along with Una Persson and Dempsey) are members of the shadow group - the League of Temporal Explorers. This time, it wasn't Bastable that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima but Dempsey and this story is about how Dempsey, Persson, Bastable and von Bek are trying to right the wrongs caused by the bomb and to show more contain the evil unleashed upon the multiverse by nuclear war.

As far as I could tell, the only serious cameos were Elric as von Bek and Josef Stalin playing the role of Djashavili - a russian socialist revolutionary, egomaniac, and sociopath.

Of the three Bastable stories, I liked this one the best. Perhaps it was simply the fact that there was a definite evil and it retained its identity through to the end - unlike the first book where there was no evil or the second where the evil kept changing. show less

An entertaining conclusion to the oswald bastable trilogy consisting of more world wars, airship battles, a despotic and messanic stalin leading a cossack revolution against a Menshevik Socialist Russia in the 1940s and of course some anarchist philosophy thrown in for good measure. Despite all this weighty content, the plot zips along at a rapid pace and the action never relents.

The wrap of Bastable's story.

The weakest story of the 3. A prisoner of war, socialism, a nuke, blah, blah.