‘The Steel Tsar’

The Steel Tsar: Third Volume In The Oswald Bastable Trilogy

St Albans: Granada, 1981 (December 17th) mass-sized paperback;
original price: £1·25;
155 pages;
I.S.B.N.: 0-583-13432-7;
cover artist: Melvyn (Grant);
no (individual) hardcover edition.

The Steel Tsar is, as its sub-title makes clear, the third volume of Moorcock’s proto-steampunk trilogy featuring Oswald Bastable, the Nomad of Time, which (like the Cornelius books) tackles head-on the legacies of British imperialism; Empire gone sour. It should be noted that Chapter Two of The Steel Tsar was significantly longer in its first American edition than in the British (first) edition. That American version was collected in The Nomad Of Time (1982), alongside The Warlord Of The Air and The Land Leviathan, before The Steel Tsar’s shorter British text was “substantially rewritten and expanded” for collection in A Nomad Of The Time Streams (1993), later being title-reverted back to The Nomad Of Time (2014) and including for the first time ever the (100%) complete text.

(Preceded by The Land Leviathan)

First edition
Granada reprint, 1982.

London: Grafton, 1990 (January 25th) mass-sized paperback;
original price:  £2·99;
155 pages;
I.S.B.N.:  0-586-20998-0;
cover artist:  Paul Damon.

First American edition: New York: DAW Books, 1982 (October) mass-sized paperback;
no sub-title;
original price:  $2·25;
160 pages;
I.S.B.N.:  0-87997-773-6;
cover artist:  Walter Velez.

London: Titan, 2013 (August 13th) trade-sized paperback;
sub-titled “Third Volume In The Oswald Bastable Trilogy” on title page (only);
edited by John Davey;
original price:  $9·95;
211 pages;
I.S.B.N.:  9781781161470;
cover artist:  “Amazing15”;
foreword by Kim Newman.

First standalone edition of the “substantially rewritten and expanded” text (see description above). This edition, however, was flawed, with an integral, fictionalised introduction (by Moorcock, describing a visit to him from Una Persson) left out.
(Click here to see uniform series covers)

(Click here for Foreign Editions)

The Steel Tsar is also available as e-books: 9781781161500 (U.S.A.) & 9780575092723 (U.K.).