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The Peshawar Lancers

The Peshawar Lancers

List Price: $6.99
Your Price: $6.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Homage to Kipling, but also to Richard Harding Davis
Review: Within Stirling's overall opus, this has to rate as a "sunny book." The representative of the Evil Cult fails this time -- with the possibility that the cult itself could be curbed in the future. There's the obligatory torture scene, but I will snerk enough to say that the hero's sidekick not only survives, but regains his health and gets back into the action.

It's alternative history with a reasonable scientific underpinning and consistently projected sociological results. The British Raj is different -- there's Kipling in the background, but also a great deal of homage to Richard Harding Davis and that whole school of late 19th to early 20th century adventure writers.

You will probably stay up reading it. I did. It's not a self-conscious Great Book, but it's very enjoyable.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Very good book, but not his best (slight spoiler warning)
Review: Stirling is an excellent writer, and this is a fast-paced, enjoyable, readable book with his usual rich world-building behind it. With that said, and much as I enjoyed the book, I don't think it's among his best. Alternate history is one of Stirling's fortes, and this book is no exception...but he also excels in the series, which allow his cast of characters to develop over time, and lets events proceed without immediate resolution. Perhaps that's why I find this book a little disappointing: the way that the big bad villain gets axed and all the likeable major characters are happily paired off by the end of the book makes it pretty obvious that there's to be no sequel. No problem with that, I just felt that the evil-is-vanquished-happily-ever-after ending was a little forced. I'd buy it again, though. Any Stirling fan will like this one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: FOR ALTERNATE HISTORY FANS, THIS ONE IS A MUST HAVE
Review: Mr. Stirling follows up his "Islanders" series with another outstanding "alternate" history novel. Set in an universe in which the Northern Hemisphere is largely destroyed by a series of comet strikes this book has great character development, a nice twisty plot, a writing style that has elements of Kipling and Doyle, and fast moving action. What else could one ask of a novel? As you turn the last page you wish there was more to the book or that the sequel was immediately at hand.

If you like a very well written adventure, buy this book.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Standard Stirling Fare
Review: Stirling puts together his usual entertaining story, unfortunately, also with his usual casual racism. His nostalgia for the old British empire is unsurprising, given his attitudes about the superiority of Europeans in general and the inferiority of Muslims in particular, and it screams out very loudly in this book.

The main difference between this book and most of Stirling's imperial fantasies is that the main character isn't a violent bisexual/lesbian. If you like Stirling, hey, he's here in all his glory.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Lancers, Forward!
Review: I have only one gripe! Ignatieff really needed to survive for at least one more book before being killed off. I mean, he was such a nicely crafted EVIL opponent that I really hated seeing him die... However, except for that one change, I found Peshawar Lancers to be a thoroughly engaging novel that swept me along with the racing tide of events. Don't get me wrong. I love the Island series for the richness and detail that has been poured into each book, but 'The Peshawar Lancers' was pared down just enough, in my opinion, to create more of a fast-paced thriller effect rather than the sweeping flow of time and tide that you feel when reading and of the 'Island' books.

I'm looking forward, impatiently, for the next Captain King adventure!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An excellent story in the tradition of British India
Review: The Peshawar Lancers is an very good story of alternate history. Although there is one particular premise I disagree with, everything else has been spot on. I won't call it flawless, but there's a lot to criticise about Shakespere too. I will say that I was very pleased with the book and don't regret the days of harrassing bookstore clerks with "Is it here yet?"

To the poster who said he was tired of Mr. Stirling's "racist totalitarianism" - The Domination is a dystopia, you twit! Go bother George Orwell over his lust for a police state.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Once again Stirling delivers
Review: Once again Stirling has produced an excellent book. However this is not a "world" book, like his utopian Island series of Dystopian Draka series. (This series is a dystopia, something which a certain earlier reviewer has failed to notice. Please learn to distinguish between the views of an author and the views of one of his characters. Especially when that character is the villian.). He has written an action adventure.
This is a story in the style of Kipling. A victorian melodrama. However it is set in an alternate world devistated by a meteorite impact. It is a tale of high adventure with a motley crew of heroes battling against a sinister conspiracy of racists and barbarians controled by a sinister devil worshiping cannibal. (Note to some, it is possible to tell who the bad guys are if you think about it.)
Do you want high adventure? Do you want a fascinating world and well developed and complex cultures? Do you want to see good triumph (something not garantied from this author)? Then buy this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Sort of a Neo-Victorian Imperial James Bond...
Review: S.M. Stirling's latest foray into alternate history is one with a rather inspired premise: after Europe and America are bombarded with comets in 1878, the British Empire must pick up its scattered pieces and reclocate to India. Now, a hundred and fifty years later, the new Britanno-Indian Empire struggles its way through 21st Century politics. While some of it reminds me of the early chapters of Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo-nominated "Darwinia", "The Peshawar Lancers" shares much thematically with Stirling's "Islander" saga: Western culture gets rocked back on its heels, but ultimately struggles and survives in a world that it has unintentionally changed.

Stirling has given a great deal of attention to his world - and it shows. Especially interesting in their own alternate-historical merit are the five appendices at the end of the book that deal with the events of the cometary impact, the British Exodus to India, the state of the world and the British Empire and the level of science and technology in his world of 2025. He has given thought to all of the major players in a world that seems almost more like Asia of the 1920s than the 2020s, but every country comes off as believable and most fall within what I could even see as plausible - given a little dramatic license, of course.

The story itself is a great deal of fun, too. The main character, Athelstane King, is an Imperial Army captain, a young manor lord and a reluctant conscript into his Majesty's service following the uncovering of a conspiracy by the Russian Czar in Samarkand. The story follows him, his armsman, his sister, an Afghan assassin, the Imperial Heir-Apparent and a Algerio-French emissary through Bzyantine plots and a very-well-realized Imperial India. It deals out action, romance, culture and history in equal measure and does so in a way that never drags or lectures.

My reservations about the book (and I have one or two) are relatively minor and deal mainly with personal differences in interpretation than complete implausibility. Having recently flipped through David Cannadine's "Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire", I find myself wondering if even in the necessity of survival, whether or not the British fleeing to India would have 'gone native' to the extent they have in Stirling's book. Certainly, the intergration of British and Indian culture makes for an interesting story and Stirling certainly researched the dynamics of Indian culture well, but I find it a point that I wish I could agree more fully with. Likewise (and this is an even less important point), I question his portrayal of Dai-Nippon (Greater Japan) a bit. As with India, he has certainly studied the culture and history of Japan, but I am not entirely certain how well he has acquainted himself with the attitudes of the times. Given the Japanese propensity for technological innovation and the fact that in 1878 Japan was coming out of a civil war and seriously looking to compete with Western powers (and that it would have been on the other side of the world from the comet impacts), I think Japan would have embarked on a far more ambitious plan of expansion with less recovery time that Stirling shows. Nonetheless, this too is a very minor point.

That aside, though, I highly recommend this book. It's a great read, it's terribly well thought-out and it is very easy to find yourself getting caught up in this very compelling world. I hope not only that this book becomes part of a wider series (it ends on a half-closed note, but certainly with the possibility of much more), but that Stirling takes us to other parts of the world - French Algeria, the Caliphate of Damascus, Greater Japan, the barbarian wilds of America and Western Europe and the rest of the Angrezi Raj (Britanno-Indian Empire) in books to come. I, for one, eagerly await them.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Jolly good show, hey what!
Review: Mr. Stirling wastes no time in capturing the flavor of the culture in which his characters live. I find his amalgamation of Indian and British culture to be realistic and enjoyable. It was very easy to get lost in the tale as i often had to make hard decisions to leave it to go take care of real responsibilities like work etc.
The thing i enjoy most about Mr. Stirling's works is that he obviously spends quite a bit of time researching the backgrounds for his stories and this book is no exception. The details are rich and well developed. Character interaction is fun and i found it easy to cheer on the main protagonist and his band of merry men(and women).

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Standard fare for the Author, put refreshingly progressive
Review: Peshawar Lancers is an interesting departure for Stirling. While its plot and characters are the same as nearly every other novel by the author, his oppressive, racist, totalitarianist rhetoric is considerably toned down in this novel. Athelstan King, the main character of the book, is the same mild-mannered, career solider, son of landed gentry as featured in nearly every single Stirling novel. Also, unsurprisingly, the Empire in which he fights for, Victorian era society made up of English refugees from a Europe ravaged by a destructive meteor shower -- transplanted to India, rules benevolently over a grateful population of servile dark-skin pheasants. Gone in this novel, however, is the "White-make-right", Nazi-inspired, racial musing of a Blond Master Race (not complete gone, but not insistently dwelt upon). The "Angrezi Raj" seems to be a progressive, liberal (almost) society, in which the rights and property of all its citizens are protected. The other mainstay of nearly all Stirling's publications, the Lesbian-warrior-sexual-carnivore, a character more akin to a "Dear Penthouse" inspired adolescent stroke fantasy, is also, gratefully, absent. Peshawar Lancers shows how the culture and religion of India influences the transplanted English aristocracy, and how they change over time to resemble the Brahmin castes who they have merged with.

The author's prose is wonderfully descriptive, and the story is quick moving and entertaining. The villains are completely evil and unsympathetic and get their reward in the end. The characters are exotic and for once likeable (sadly still one-dimensional with no development). The best part of Peshawar Lancers, like all of Stirling's fiction, is the bold colorful description of a fictional society quite different from our own.


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