The Peshawar Lancers - Background

Background

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 is unable to survive without the ability to raise crops in winter-like conditions that last for three years. In order to survive, the British Empire, under the leadership of Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, employed the Royal Navy and dozens of civilian ships 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 in time, Benjamin 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 Britain, as well as millions of other people around the world, have died as a result of the disaster.

The book is set in the year 2025 A.D., after the world's climate has finally recovered from the devastation of the meteors. The political geography of the time is dramatically different from our own world, and innovations such as the airplane and combustion engine are only beginning to reach prominence. The Angrezi Raj (formerly the British Empire), centered in its former colonies in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, is the most powerful nation on Earth. It stands alongside other surviving world powers, including France-outre-mer (a European-settled North Africa), the Caliphate of Damascus (a united Middle East), the Empire of Dai-Nippon (a united China and Japan), and the Russian Empire (a remnant of the original, now located in central Asia).

Athelstane King is an officer of the Peshawar Lancers, an outfit that guards the northern borders of the Angrezi Raj, who becomes involved in an adventure filled with political intrigue, numerous chases, harrowing escapes, swashbuckling, and the exploration of a world that seems to be forever trapped in the Victorian era. The novel features many similarities to the styles of writing of such famous authors as Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard, which serve as both homage and satire to their works, along with elements of colonialist attitude, cultism, and general fantasy.