The Peshawar Lancers

I must say, that was a pretty rollicking alternate-history adventure! A meteor or some such falling heavenly body strikes the earth at the end of the 1800's. All technological progress halts, and the world is thrown screaming back into the Middle Ages as nuclear winter makes coastal locations uninhab......more

This book highlights both Stirling's strengths and weaknesses. His main strength is the power of his underlying ideas, and the depth with which he has thought them out. The premise is that the entire northern hemisphere basically got wiped out by meteors in the 19th century, but Britain managed to r......more

The Peshawar Lancers is a rip-roaring, swashbuckling tale of Alternate History rooted firmly in the tradition of Rudyard Kipling and other 19th Century 'adventure' writers such as H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Set in a world where the planet was devastated by a spray of comets in the mi......more

S.M. Stirling is a master of alternate worlds. In his Nantucket trilogy, the island of Nantucket and all its inhabitants get mysteriously transposed with the island’s bronze-age counterpart and must figure out how to live in this strange new–or old–world. In his Emberverse series, Stirling explores......more

This could have been an amazing book. The premise is a little unusual - the earth is struck by a series of meteors, causing a miniature ice age. Western civilization essentially collapses, and British society relocates to India. Against this backdrop of severe cultural/social upheaval, there is a my......more