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

Author:Michael Moorcock [Moorcock, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781161494
Publisher: Titan

It was perhaps ironic, therefore, that a couple of months later, having sounded out possible ‘employers’, we sailed for Bantustan with the intention of joining that country’s navy.

Bantustan had been better known in my own world as South Africa. It had been one of the first colonies to make a bid for independence during those pre-war years when O’Bean’s inventions had released the world from poverty and ignorance. Under the leadership of a young politician of Indian parentage called Gandhi, it had succeeded in negotiating a peaceful withdrawal from the British Empire, almost without the Empire realizing what had happened. Naturally, the great wealth of Bantustan—its diamonds and its gold alone—was not something which British, Dutch and American interests had wished to give up easily, yet Gandhi had managed to placate them by offering them large shareholdings in the mines without their having to invest any further capital. Since most of the companies had been public ones, shareholders’ meetings had all voted for Gandhi’s schemes. Then the war had come and there was no longer any need to pay dividends to the dead and the lost. Bantustan had prospered greatly during and after the war and was well on its way to becoming an important and powerful force in the postwar political game. By building up its military strength, by signing pacts with General Hood which ensured him of important supplies of food and minerals at bargain prices, President Gandhi had protected his neutrality. Bantustan was probably one of the safest and most stable small nations in the world, and since it required our experience and our ship, it was the obvious choice for us. Moreover, we were assured, we should find no racialistic nonsense there. Black, brown and white races lived together in harmony—a model to the rest of the world. My only reservations concerned the political system operating there. It was a republic based upon the theories of a German dreamer and arch-socialist called Karl Marx. This man, who in fact lived a large part of his life in a tolerant England, had made most radicals sound like the highest of High Tories, and personally I regarded his ideas as at best unrealistic and at worst morally and socially dangerous. I doubted if his main theories could have worked in any society and I expected to have quick proof of this as soon as we docked in Cape Town.

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