The Peshawar Lancers is an alternate history, steampunk, post-apocalyptic fiction adventure novel by S. M. Stirling,[1][2] with its point of divergence occurring in 1878 when the Earth is struck by a devastating meteor shower.

[5] 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.

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.

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.

[3] Athelstane King is an officer of the Peshawar Lancers, a regiment 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.

Centered in Samarkand, Russia is roundly feared and despised for its Satan worshipping, and the ritualistic cannibalism used to terrorize the empire's Uzbek and Tajik subjects.

The priests have developed a cult based around the worship of Chernobog, after an old Slavic god of death (to which seem to be mutated elements of the Yazidi belief in the Peacock Angel).

Smaller empires include the Dominion of Braganza, a shadowy nation centred in Rio de Janeiro, reigned over by Dom Pedro and ruled by a succession of caudillos; the Sultanate of Egypt, eyed by the Caliphate of Damascus, France-outre-mer, and the Angrezi Raj for its access to the ruined Suez Canal; and the Emirate of Afghanistan, which serves as a buffer between the Raj and Russia.

Other semi-civilised powers in North America include the Kaijun, Cherokee, Kumanch, and Mehk peoples, as well as a small Mormon enclave near the Great Salt Lake.

Athelstane King, a cavalry officer in the Peshawar Lancers, and his friend, Sikh Daffadar Narayan Singh, are ordered to go on medical leave after being wounded in battle.

After escaping one attempt on his life, King decides to leave for Oxford in disguise, but on the train, he is nearly killed again by the Pashtun assassin Ibrahim Khan.

To ensure Cassandra's safety, King's friend Sir Manfred Warburton arranges for her to be hired by the royal palace as tutor to King-Emperor John II's daughter, Princess Sita.

The captain takes the King-Emperor hostage and reveals that he has planted evidence implicating other governments in the assassination attempt, in order to trigger a major war.

Stirling postulates that without the resources and innovation of Europe and North America, technological advancement would have been slowed due to the local conditions of the surviving nations.

[10] Steven H Silver called the novel an "action-filled adventure through a future reminiscent of the British Raj" and described the characters as being "sympathetic and realistic despite the alternate world which they inhabit."