Monday, October 14, 2013

Book 60: The Warlord of Air by Michael Moorcock

I loved that I read this book shortly after The Time Machine as it shows the difference between a truly great visionary writer (HG Wells) who uses a great understanding of human qualities and a good writer who uses his understanding of current political climate.  I hated this book.  Well, maybe not hated, but what started as a fascinating story of a man from the early 20th century dropped into an alternate utopian (though not if you are disenfranchised) future of the 1970s replete with Zeppelins winning the air superiority format war.  It started very promising, then, socialist dogma robbed the book of any real meaning.  Wells, who wrote a time travel book 60 years before this one, managed to keep his book feeling current thanks to mostly avoiding polemic and focusing on the human condition while Moorcock eschews human condition in favor of making political fodder that seem laughable now.  Needless to say, I will not be reading the sequels.

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