In the Russian sector of a battle-torn multiverse, Captain Oswald Bastable confronts the mythical agents of destruction and death. In his epical adventures in the alternative twentieth century, Chrononaut Bastable, member of the League of Temporal Adventurers, has crossed and re-crossed many different time-streams.. The Steel Tsar finds him travelling backwards in time from a shell-shocked Singapore to a Tsarist Empire seething with conflict, and preyed on by motley bands of rogues and adventurers. Here he meets up with fellow-time-traveller Miss Una Persson, and together they change the course of history whose mythical deeds go beyond the boundaries of everyday imagination and glitter in the exuberant land of the eternal present.