The Peshawar Lancers By SM Stirling

 The Peshawar Lancers 

By SM Stirling

Stephan Micheal Stirling was born on September 30th of 1953 in Metz France, to Alfred Bruce, a wing commander in the Royal Canadian Airforce, and Marjorie Stirling. At the time Metz was the site of a Canadian Air Force base. He spent most of his childhood in Canada, graduating from Carleton University with a BA (with honors) in history and graduating from Osgoode Hall Law School in York University. He became an American citizen in 2003 and lives in New Mexico with his wife Jan. His first book Snowbrother was released in 1985, which means he's been writing for 35 years and doesn't show any signs of stopping.

As you might guess this has resulted in a simply massive body of work, which if you're a fan of fantasy and science fiction the odds are incredibly high that you've at least heard of some of his work. Such as the Draka or Emberverse series, both of which could be considered alternative histories. There's also the General series with David Drake and his current series which starts with the book Black Chamber, an alternate history where Theodore Roosevelt beats Woodrow Wilson to win a 3rd term as President. Lesser known works of his include his 5th-millennium series, a fantasy series that takes place in a far future where humanity is still recovering from the fall of our civilization.  There is also the Lords of Creation series, and books like The Peshawar Lancers. 

The Peshawar Lancers was published in 2002 by Roc books, it's a stand-alone novel, although there is a short story titled Shikari in Galveston that takes in the same world only in Texas. The Peshawar Lancers is an alternate history that is in some ways a spiritual sequel/retelling of the 1916 book, King of the Khyber Rifles. The book tells the adventures of Captain King in Afghanistan at the start of the first world war operating as a spy for the British Raj. That said the Peshawar Lancers actually carries a lot of Mr. Stirling's standard themes, which helps set it apart from its inspiration. Such themes as his enjoyment of kicking over the table of our world so he can write adventures in the aftermath, his love of alternate history and his willingness to both explore non-western and non-modern viewpoints, and his willingness to look at some dark places to do so(Neat, though I like speculative biology/ecology from a somewhat global viewpoint). Mr. Stirling enjoys writing adventure novels and that's clearly evident in the adventures of Athelstane King here. Let me delve a bit into the world of the Peshawar Lancers, a fair warning there are some mild spoilers ahead as the book is 18 years old now. 

In October of 1878, a series of objects struck the earth in the northern hemisphere. Whether they were pieces of a single comet or asteroid or a group that just happen to hit together has never been determined. It is known that a series of impacts ranging east to west from just south of Moscow to the middle of the North Atlantic have been estimated to have an impact strength estimated to range from 100 to 300 megatons each. The North Atlantic strike was the most devastating, however, as it triggered a tsunami that slammed into the shores of North America and Western Europe. This wiped out most of the coastal cities on the Atlantic coasts of both continents as the wave was powerful enough to reach the Appalachian mountains at some points (Did it return Florida to the sea? Please tell me Florida became a giant coral reef {Florida remerges from the sea sad to say} Damn it Sarasota why wont you die!). 

However, London and a large chunk of England were protected by the island of Ireland absorbing the wave. Although I have to assume the Irish would not be thrilled by this. The British Isles as a whole would also protect the low countries and parts of Germany and France. This frankly would have been bad enough and while it wouldn't have slain western civilization, it would have likely broken the colonial empires on its own. There were, however, additional problems following in the wake of the impact. The strikes altered the climate, disrupting the Gulf Stream and cutting off enough sunlight to cause a miniature ice age where farming basically became impossible in large chunks of the northern hemisphere until the 1890s. See this is the kind of thing I’m oddly interested in, would this slow all of the gulf stream by cutting off its energy supply in the low latitude regions of the West African coast? Does this concentrated heat in the Gulf of Mexico creating a biological haven? DO ICE AGE CONDITIONS SAVE THE BUFFALO? {He doesn’t say, but I would be interested in your opinion}(Ok so at this point the American Bison is facing extinction however this climate shift could foster conditions that are not good for wheat, corn and other cereal crops but do heavily favor tough prairie grasses.  DC is a swamp so its definitely gone and so there is no one pushing for the final extinction of the Bison, I can see Native American groups of the great plains essentially retaking much of their land because they either didn’t rely on agriculture or farmed plants that were much more hardy.  Additionally, while this would make agriculture in the central states harder it MIGHT make the climate more mild or even wetter in places like the badland or the high deserts of the American West.  Meanwhile, the Bison is a descendant of a species that not only thrived during the last ice age in exactly these conditions. Also elk, elk don’t care about the cold, they love it, we tried to wipe them out too as a second way of driving Native peoples off their land but the tricky bastards were too hardy.) Let's be blunt, the modern world would have trouble surviving such an event. For the late Victorian era? It was a death blow. 

When this was realized the British government came up with an ambitious plan, using every ship they could get their hands on, they would evacuate as many from the British Isles as possible to ensure the continuation of the Empire. Of the 20 million who survived the impacts, the evacuation would save 3.5 million, the various European powers would attempt various evacuations of their own. Some like the French were very successful, others like the Russians would have dark consequences down the line. Most, like the Germans and central Europeans, would be failures. By 1890, there were under 10 million survivors in all of Europe. 

Meanwhile, in India where most of the ruling elite and the army had been relocated, rebellion exploded and the Afghani tribes came sweeping down from the mountains desperate for food. The next couple of decades were a bitter struggle for food, land, and survival but the British and their allied native groups like the Sikhs and Gurkha survived and won. They would spend the 20th-century rebuilding and slowly being absorbed into India even as they believed they had conquered it. Because of this effort and the sheer loss of life (the population of the world in 2025 is like half a billion people), the speed of technological and social advancement has been greatly slowed. (This is interesting to me because it effectively means the green revolution of the 1960’s never happened anywhere, but the forces that drove that revolution are magnified in this world {Would we be at the point of needing it?  I mean there are only 500 million people alive and large chunks of unsettled land at this point} yes they would be needing it, the green revolution is what allowed the human population to explode, more food= lower childhood mortality, the world population was about 500 million in the year 1800, the average woman had between 4 and 6 children but what kept the population from growing was largely food limitation.  In 1964 there were 4 billion people on earth but ¼ of them were in direct risk of starvation, by 2000 there were 6 billion people on earth but less than 800 million were at risk of starving.  As I tell my students, we never lived in ecological balance with nature we died in ecological balance with nature. ) The British Empire would also hold on in places like Australia and South Africa with the Angrezi Raj (Did they abandon or keep the apartheid system? Seems like it would be harder to hold onto without the same backing from the British army {They did not instead a million extra white Englishmen got dumped into South Africa, which likely reinforced the system}), as this new Empire came to call itself, becoming the most powerful state on Earth. It's into this world at the beginning of the 21st century that Athelstane King is born. 

Our story proper begins in 2025, when after a successful campaign into Afghanistan Captain King is sent home for medical leave with his right-hand man (is it Malaria like Dr. Watson? {Stab wound to the shoulder}) and hereditary retainer Narayan Singh,  On the way home, however, a strange and unpleasant meeting with Sir. Manfred Warburton of the Imperial Service, the spy agency of the empire, followed by an ambush by Muslim Assassins, forces Captain King to abandon any ideas of a quiet holiday. Instead what follows is an adventure through a strange but somewhat familiar world of the Angrezi Raj. Captain King must venture into the shadowy world of espionage and diplomacy to learn just who is trying not just to kill him but also his twin sister Cassandra and why the fate of a family of small untitled landowners might also be the fate of the world. Because mixed into this is not just the fate of the Royal family, or their current efforts to seal a dynastic marriage with the rulers of France Outer Mer and eventually unify the two most powerful European Successor states but something even more important. 

To do this he'll have to also pursue hidden knowledge of his family's past as it's not just the current generation that finds a target painted on its collected backside but his father was a target for assassination as well. Captain King lost his father at a young age, so he knows very little of his father's life except through the stories that his Mother and his honorary Uncle, Narayan's father, told him. So the discovery that his father may have some sort of shadowy feud going on with the dark cult that dominates the Russian Empire is kind of a revelation. See when the Russian court marched south, it fell under the sway of a mad priest (Ra-ra-Rasputin…) who decided that everything going on meant that Satan had finally defeated God. This turned into a merger of Satan with the Slavic god Chernobog and a misinterpretation of the peacock angel, Melek Taus, the central figure of the real-life Yazid religion. It's a bloody-handed cult that celebrates cannibalism and degeneracy. Just for the record I don't mean the party hard have fun degeneracy you're thinking of. I mean real, let's do things that destroy our self-respect and ability to trust people, degeneracy. (It’s always rural cannibal death cults, you would think these things would collapse under their own weight.  How do you get anything done if you are always keeping an eye on your neighbors to see if they are looking extra hungry)

Honestly, the Russian cult part is the part of the book I like the least because I kind of have trouble believing in it. I mean I can see priests and others going mad when it looks like the end of the world and believing that Satan himself has impossibly triumphed against the Almighty. But I have trouble seeing such a cult take over an entire nation and hold control for almost 150 years! I mean, for fuck sake they eat people! Not just once in a while but regularly and they celebrate it! This really seems like something that all the neighbors would get together to wipe out (EXACTLY!). For that matter, you think a realm where the nobles and priests are regularly culling the lower classes for brutal blood-soaked rituals that end in dinner would be one constantly on the edge of open rebellion! I mean, you're a serf and sooner or later they are going to eat you or your kids, what do you have to lose here? Even if they kill you, at least you've forced them to do it quickly and they'll have to figure out how to do their own damn farming now! (I understand an increase in animal agriculture in the wake of this sort of climate shift, but humans have absolutely crap energy conversion in terms of feed to protein ratio.  The time and energy needed to raise a kid for food is just not worth it, there are much better uses for orphan parts if you are getting into black magic or any other forbidden knowledge.) 

That said, I do love hating Count Ignatieff, the Russian agent sent to kill King and pull off a greater, darker plot. Count Ignatieff is highly intelligent, motivated, and quick on his feet but he also views everyone around him as either a tool to be used or a possible future meal(oh hey look an actual controlled sociopath not leatherface on a bender that's nice). He's also a religious zealot and true believer in the Russian Cult, to the point that he is fully on board with not just human extinction but the extinction of life itself on the planet. This puts him on a plane above your normal villain as normally our villains aren't... You know... Omnicidal(Giant Asteroid 2024, vote for a candidate who makes their intention clear.). He's an utter monster but one in complete control of himself, so he's able to function in a normal society even as he plots its downfall. Mr. Stirling even gives us a couple of scenes from his viewpoint so we can see how an utterly amoral monster from our view looks at the world. Additionally, the seeds of Count Ignatieff's fate come from the fact that he can only view people as tools or possible meals. So I kinda enjoy that as well. 

The Peshawar Lancers takes place in a vivid, wondrous world with sights great and terrible to show you, with a diverse and honestly interesting array of characters. What I really like is the Angrezi and other European descended characters don't think like we do and act like people from a different society. Although one that is rather close to ours so they're not completely alien. I honestly enjoyed the sheer adventure of the book through a different world, I also enjoyed the fact that I was reading an Alt-History novel that wasn't what if the Nazis won World War II or if the Confederacy won the Civil War (seriously there is more to history guys)Ok yeah but I low key want to know if this impact event killed or escalated the North American Sharecropping model? {Well given that the only civilization mentioned in North America is weird theocratic Californian city-states... }The action is well written and the characterization is well done if a little sparse. The dialogue is peppered with a number of non-English terms like Bhai and Chalo but honestly, you should be able to figure out most of that through context. That said elements like the Russian Cannibal Satan cult and elements of the plot keep it from A status in my mind. This puts The Peshawar Lancers by SM Stirling at a B+ for me. I would encourage anyone who has never read a Stirling book before to start here because if you enjoy this book, you'll enjoy most of his other work. 

I hope you enjoyed this review, this book was voted on by our ever-wise patrons.  If you’d like a vote on what books get reviewed and even monthly themes and more, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a dollar a month gets you a vote.  Hope to see you there soon.  Next week we take a look at a primary source The Travels of Ibn Battutah!  Until then, stay safe and Keep Reading! 

Blue text is our guest editor Mr. Davis

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders