The War Lord of the Air is one of Michael Moorcock's best. His ingenious and original notion of an alternative history enables him to reconstruct the twentieth century rather than just go SFing off into the blue…. There's a great Boy's Own adventure on the North-West frontier to counterpoint and contrast with the good old space/time continuum. But again the packaging is overdone. There are three layers to unwrap before we get to the hard stuff in the Himalayas. Within the fiction titled The War Lord of the Air is another fiction narrated in an Editor's Note which describes the discovery of a manuscript said to have been written by Moorcock's grandfather. Grandpa's manuscript introduces another book-within-a-book, a story told by Bastable, a washed-up Englishman living on an island in the Indian Ocean…. And so to the triple coda….

Moorcock also overdoes his attempts to rationalise the...