The Peshawar Lancers
Cover of the 2003 mass market edition
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| Author | S. M. Stirling |
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| Cover artist | Duane Myers |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Alternate history |
| Publisher | Roc Books |
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Publication date
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2002 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 483 (paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 51390580 |
| Preceded by | "Shikari in Galveston" |
The Peshawar Lancers is an alternate history, steampunk, post-apocalyptic fiction adventure novel by S. M. Stirling, with its point of divergence occurring in 1878 when the Earth is struck by a devastating meteor shower. The novel's plot takes place in the year 2025, at a time when the British Empire has become the powerful Angrezi Raj and is gradually recolonizing the world alongside other nations and empires that were able to survive. The novel was published in 2002, and was a Sidewise Award nominee for best long-form alternate history.
Stirling also wrote a novella, Shikari in Galveston, which is set in the same background as The Peshawar Lancers, but occurs several years earlier. It was published in the alternate history collection Worlds That Weren't.
The story details a world where a heavy meteor shower, known as "the Fall," impacted with catastrophic force across much of the Northern Hemisphere in 1878, creating a massive dust cloud that blots out the sun. This in turn causes the collapse of Industrialized civilization, which was unable to survive without the ability to raise crops in winter-like conditions that lasted for three years. In order to survive, the British Government, under the leadership of Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, employed the Royal Navy and all merchant shipping to evacuate the population of the British Isles to its colonies in India, Australasia, and South Africa over the next several years. After martial law breaks down in 1881, the rioting British lower classes storm the remaining military outposts in London; unable to escape, Disraeli is killed by rioters and becomes a martyr. The British Isles are abandoned, initially becoming the home of groups of degenerate cannibalistic savages, most of which quickly consume each other to extinction, and are only cautiously recolonized in the 20th Century. By the time relatively normal weather returns, nine-tenths of the former population in the UK, as well as millions of other people around the world, have died as a result of the disaster.
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