The Peshawar Lancers is an alternate history adventure novel by S. M. Stirling, with its point of divergence set in 1878. It was published in 2002, and was a Sidewise Award nominee for best long-form alternate history.

Stirling also wrote a novella, Shikari in Galveston, set in the same background but taking place a generation earlier. It was published in the collection Worlds That Weren't.

Story

The story details a world where central Europe and the North Atlantic was struck by a particularly dense and heavy meteor shower (the Fall) in 1878, causing the collapse of civilization in Europe and North America. In order to survive, the British Empire under the leadership of Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli had to employ the Royal Navy and whichever ships it could muster to transport as much of its population and culture as possible to the colonies in India.

The book is set in the year 2025, after the world has finally healed and the political geography is completely different from our own. The British Raj, centered in India, South Africa, and Australia is the most powerful nation on Earth. Its rivals are the Ottomans, the now-combined China and Japan, and the surviving remnants of the Russian Empire in central Asia.

Athelstane King is an officer of the Peshawar Lancers, an outfit that guards the northern borders of the Raj, and he becomes involved along with some friends in an adventure filled with political intrigue, chases, escapes, swashbuckling, and an exploration of a world that seems to be forever trapped in the Victorian age. The novel features damsels in distress, noble savages, and all the attitudes of British colonialism commonly found in the works of Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard, serving simultaneously as homage and satire.