July 10, 2007

Good escape fiction...

Charlene and I both recommend The Peshawar Lancers, by S. M. Stirling. It's about an alternative future in which Britain and the Northern Hemisphere were devastated by meteor showers in 1870. Millions of English re-located to India, and re-constituted the British Empire. Now, 150 years later, technology is at about the level of our 1900, and the cultures have merged and blended in interesting ways.

It's a story of old-fashioned daring-do and romance, with splendid heroes and the most exceedingly evil villains...

Posted by John Weidner at July 10, 2007 12:18 PM
Comments

John,

Have you tried his other series, starting with the book "Island in the Sea of Time"?

http://www.amazon.com/Island-Sea-Time-S-Stirling/dp/0451456750/ref=sr_1_6/104-7697885-0625539?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184133215&sr=1-6

Sorry about the long URL-- I don't know how to hand-craft a link in HTML....

Posted by: Hale Adams at July 10, 2007 10:57 PM

Link: Island in the Sea of Time. Did you like it?

The way to make a link is:

<a href="URL-goes-here">what-you-see-goes-here</a>

Those quote marks around the URL are part of the formula.

Posted by: John Weidner at July 11, 2007 06:08 AM

Ah. OK, thanks, John.

I liked the book and its sequels. I think Stirling is a little too optimistic about how well people in that long ago time (3750 B.C. as I recall) would have fitted into the transplanted Americans' society, but what the hey, it's fiction. :)

Still, it's a page-turner, with some pretty memorable (and creepy!) characters, along with reminders of how good can all too easily get perverted into truly hideous evil. It makes you glad that Frederick Taylor didn't come along a millenium ago in a different society. The villain of the series, Walker, is bad enough just through application of ordinary bureaucratic practices to thoroughly evil ends. (Of course, Taylor couldn't have had the influence he did except in the United States or Europe circa 1900, anyway.....)

The last book in the series leaves a thread or two hanging, making possible another book or two, but if he never writes another book in the series, that's OK-- the books stand just fine by themselves.

Posted by: Hale Adams at July 11, 2007 07:25 PM
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