S. M. Stirling’s Alternate Histories

by D. A. Madigan

Table of Contents
Part 3 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Another interesting tendency Stirling has shown, which we may dwell on more in our next section, is to include in his narratives an extremely competent brother/sister team of action heroes who seem to have a slightly unhealthy degree of affection for each other. Which is as good a segue as any, I suppose, for:

A woggy night in London Town

On October 3, 1878, the first of a series of high-velocity heavenly bodies struck the earth. The impacts continued for the next 12 hours, moving in a band from east to west and impacting at shallow angles. The scanty and confused records meant that it was never possible to determine the exact nature of the object or objects; the consensus of Imperial scholars a century and a half later was that the Fall was either a spray of comets or a smaller number of large comets (possibly only one) that broke up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
— Appendix One: The Fall, The Peshawar Lancers

From this auspicious beginning, one of the most complexly detailed, exciting, entertaining, and intriguing alternate history adventure stories I’ve ever read is spun.

Due to the Fall, the entire history of the world, as you’d expect, is substantially altered. England, in order to survive as a nation, evacuates 3.5 million of its subjects (leaving another 16.5 behind in the British Isles to starve or survive through reversion to savage cannibalism) into its territory in India.

Russia survives by making a virtue of necessity; the Russian nobility establishes a Priesthood of Malik Nous, or Tchernobog, which makes cannibalism a religious ceremony, allowing the ancient Czar and his attendant nobility to survive by devouring their Asiatic subjects.

Japan, mostly spared the impacts of the Fall, ends up taking over most of China, and the Islamic states also benefit from the Fall, expanding under the Caliph to a point where one Moslem nation now rules most of what we would call the Middle East.

But enough of that. Let’s talk about story:

Our heroes are Athelstane King and his twin sister Cassandra. Like previous twin-pairings we’ve seen in other Stirling novels, one gets the impression that the King siblings would really enjoy taking a year long vacation to Heinlein’s Boondock, where they could finally get all this repressed incestuous lust out of their systems once and for all. The Kings, for reasons unknown to them, are at the center of a vast conspiracy whose main purpose seems to be their assassination. Since the Kings are hardly all that essential to the Angrezi Raj/British Empire (a very peculiar fusion of Indian/Oriental culture and 19th-century Victorianism), these determined attempts (by factions representing every enemy the Raj has) baffle them. However, what the Kings do not know is that the Russian Empire has bred up a line of reliable psychic seeresses who are capable of seeing probable futures, and in the most probable of those futures, the Kings’ deaths will cause the downfall of the Raj, and eventually, the extinction of all mankind, when another, larger heavenly body impacts the Earth without warning more than a century into the future.

The villain of the piece, the utterly evil Count Ignatieff, is a High Priest of Malik Nous who has been trying to wipe out the King dynasty for two generations now. As a young man, he set an ambush that took the life of Athelstane and Cassandra’s father, and now he seeks the deaths of the two younger Kings, in order to bring about the future worldlines his insane and cannibalistic cult of death most fervently desires.

Honestly, that’s all you need to know about the book. Written with Stirling’s normal fanatical attention to cultural and historical detail, plastered with atmosphere and riddled with intrigue, the plot thunders forward at a mad gallop without pausing for breath from the first page to the last. Both viscerally exciting and intellectually intriguing, The Peshawar Lancers is a, you know, all those cliché things I’m supposed to say here... a riotous romp, a non stop thrill ride of blah blah blah, an over the top action/adventure in the best tradition of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs... you’ve read a bunch of dust jacket flaps just like I have, fill in the blanks yourself.

I really enjoyed this book, and am enjoying re-reading it. Having said that, I will note that this is not an alternate history I myself would want to even so much as visit, much less live in; when Stirling goes into elaborate detail as to the various cuisines (mutton and turnips! AUGH!) enjoyed by the thoroughly Indianized characters, it frankly wrenches my stomach into knots and makes me want to shriek for a waiter to immediately bring me a roast beef sandwich with a side order of potato chips. Stirling is very aware, and obviously enjoying himself vastly, as he torments his Western audiences with lovingly detailed descriptions of the meals eaten by his heroes; one exchange between Prince Charles (!) of the Raj/Imperium and our heroine Cass indicates that due to the Indian influence over Raj culture, both of them are simply horrified at the thought of eating ‘cow meat’... and my God, the thought of a life without beef is enough to make me think the folks who died in the Fall got off easy.

Aside from that, though, what I find most fascinating about the book is the very real pleasure Stirling seems to take in the destruction of North America depicted in this timeline. Heinlein, of course, wiped out the entire Northern Hemisphere in Farnham’s Freehold, but he never really seemed to enjoy it all that much.

Stirling, on the other hand, seems to be dancing in the ruins of 19th-century America with ghoulish joy when he writes, in Appendix Four, Imperial English and Other Languages [pg 415, last paragraph]:

In the interior of North America, a wild variety of English-based creoles and pidgins were spoken among the neobarbarians; something fairly close to nineteenth-century standard English survived in the Mormon enclaves of the Rockies, which maintained a tradition of literacy; and Spanish-influenced forms were common in the Free Cities of California..

Combine this with the undeniably American origins of the sociopathically savage Kommanz in Snowbrother, and the fact that their victims, the very civilized Mintzans, are fairly obviously of Canadian derivation (and Stirling himself is Canadian) and, well... gee, Steve... I got your American neobarbarians right down here, fella. Why don’t you pucker up and give ‘em a nice long smooch, buddy?

One more note, this one also in the ‘no one will find this interesting but me’ category... I found it fascinating that only shortly before reading The Peshawar Lancers, I had previously encountered, for the first time in my life, references to both Malik Nous and Tchernobog, in widely separated areas: Malik Nous is the demonic, Earth-ruling figure worshipped by the character King Peacock in Alan Moore’s excellent comic book series Top 10, while Tchernobog is a very vivid secondary character in Neil Gaiman’s interesting if ultimately disappointing fantasy novel American Gods.

One wonders if Stirling reads the same source material as Moore and Gaiman... or maybe, if he just reads Moore and Gaiman? (That last isn’t a criticism; I just read Moore and Gaiman, myself. Nothin’ wrong there.)

* * *

The original text, above, was written some three years ago. For purposes of this publication, I have revised it very slightly, and am adding this short afterword, to acknowledge that since this article was first written, Stirling has added a few installments to the worlds created in The Peshawar Lancers and the Islander series.

“Shikari in Galveston” is a novella that appeared in an anthology titled Worlds that Weren’tPenguin/Roc 0-451-45886-9, Aug 2002) . It tells a longish tale of an adventure had by the fathers of the protagonists of Peshawar Lancers, set in neobarbarian North America. It’s quite good.

Even better, Dies the Fire (Penguin/Roc, 0-451-45979-2, Aug 2004), kicks off a new projected series set in the modern day that the island of Nantucket left behind when it was sent hurtling back into the pre-Christian era. Following The Event, the Earth experiences a fundamental shift in quantum physics, one that prevents most known explosives from functioning and that changes the electrical impedance of all known building materials enough to make electricity unworkable.

The second book in this series, The Protector’s War, is due to be published September 1, 2005, and you can find a link to 10 sample chapters at S.M. Stirling’s fan site, http://www.smstirling.com. Dies the Fire is an excellent novel, perhaps the most interesting, ambitious, detailed, and original ‘post Apocalypse’ story I’ve read since Stephen King’s The Stand. I can only hope Stirling maintains this high quality level through its two projected sequels, and am anxiously awaiting The Protector’s War in a few weeks.