Free The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) by Michael Moorcock

devoted to attaining that bread, but once his mind is clear, once he has ceased to labour through all his waking hours to find food, then he begins to think. If he has the opportunity to gather facts, if his mind is educated, then he begins to consider his position in the world and compare it with that of other men. Now it was possible for thousands to understand that the world’s power was in the hands of a few—the landowners, the industrialists, the politicians and the ruling classes. All these people had welcomed O’Bean’s scientific and technical advances—for they were able to lease his patents, to build their own machines, to make themselves richer as those they ruled became better off. But twenty-five years is enough time for a new generation to grow up—a generation which has never known dire poverty and which, unlike a previous generation, is no longer merely grateful that it has leisure time and more than enough to eat. That generation begins to want to control its own fate in myriad ways. In short, it seeks political power.
    By 1900, in this world, civil strife had become a fact of life in almost every nation, large and small. In some countries, usually those which had been the most backward, revolutions succeeded, and, attended by a fanatical nationalism, new power groups were formed. The Great Powers found their colonial territories snatched from them—in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas—and since the sources of power were cheap and O’Bean’s patents were distributed everywhere, since military power no longer depended so much on large, well-trained armies (or even navies), these older nations were wary of starting wars with the newer nations, preferring to try to retain their positions by means of complicated diplomacy, by building up ‘spheres of influence’. But complicated diplomatic games played in the far corners of the world tend to have a habit of creating stronger tensions at home, so in Europe, in particular, but also in the United States and Japan, nationalism grew stronger and stronger and fierce battles of words began to take place between the Great Powers. Trade embargoes, crippling and unnecessarily unfair tariff restrictions were applied and returned. A madness began to fill the heads of those who ruled. They saw themselves threatened from within by their young people, who demanded what they saw as more social justice, and from without by their neighbouring countries. More and more resources were devoted to the building up of land, sea and air fleets, of large guns, of armies which could control dissident populations (and at the same time, hopefully, absorb them). In many countries enforced military service, after the Prussian model, became the norm— and this in turn brought an increasingly furious reaction from those who sought to reform their governments. Active, violent revolutionary methods began to be justified by those who had originally hoped to achieve their ends by means of oratory and the ballot box.
    What O’Bean himself thought of this nobody knows, but it was likely that he did feel enormously guilty. One story has it that on the inevitable day when the Great Powers went to war he quietly committed suicide.
    The war was at first contained only in Europe, and in the first weeks most of the major cities of the Continent and Britain were reduced to ash and rubble. A short-lived Central American Alliance lasted long enough to go to war with the United States and quickly achieved a similar end. Huge mobile war machines rolled across the wasted land; sinister aerial battleships cruised smoke-filled skies; while under the water lurked squadrons of subaquatic men-o’-war, often destroying one another without ever once rising to the surface where more conventional ironclads blasted rivals to bits with the horrifically powerful guns invented by a boy of thirteen years old.
    “But most of the real fighting’s over now,” said the sergeant, with a tinge of contempt. “The