Second paragraph of third chapter:
One of the Peshawar Club’s discreet manservants had slipped the calling card under the door. As King read, he fended off the soft rounded warmth that pressed to his back, and the hands that reached teasingly around his body and tried to undo the bath towel wrapped about his waist.
Warning: this is a long piece, and a lot of it is pedantic whining.
This is the last of the science fiction novels that I found set in 2025 (and published before 2005), though I have a graphic novel coming up still. It’s also the longest of them, and the one in which 2025 has diverged the most from our own history. In this timeline, Europe and North America were devastated by meteorites in 1878, and the British Empire has resettled in India, with the royal family adopting a syncretic version of Anglicanism and Hinduism (Islam is a religion of the provinces and fringes) and ruling a polity anchored by South Africa at one end and Australia at the other. They are on friendly terms with France/Algeria, where the Napoleonic dynasty has resumed power, and threatened by the Russians, who have become devil-worshippers and cannibals based in Central Asia. China and Japan have united and are distantly threatening. Technology has developed to roughly steampunk level rather than anything more sophisticated.
Our heroes, a happy band of protagonists including the heirs to both the British and French empires (the latter is meant to be a surprise but it’s signalled pretty much from the start), with a diverse crew of warriors and a magically talented Russian defector, are battling to prevent the Russians taking over which would obviously be a Bad Thing. Starts with a fridging, then lots of steampunky combat and action, finishing with several perilous passages on an airship over Afghanistan, in the spirit of Kipling and Flashman. It’s an alternate world where the ruling classes happily bicker about who gets to rule, and where men are real men and allow women to be intellectuals too if they want. The obvious three couples all get together at the end. (Also, the Peshawar Lancers of the title are barely in the story at all.)
It’s all meant to be great fun, but several things really annoyed me about this novel. Stirling is determined to show off to us how much research he has done; but a little learning can be a dangerous thing. In Chapter 2, we have the following passage:
The younger man whispered to his companion in Bengali: “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.”
The older man flicked a look at Ignatieff’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Bengali and Hindi were closely related—and the Okhrana agent beamed uncomprehending friendship.
He spoke both languages perfectly, of course.
Bengali and Hindi are not closely related. They are from different branches of the Indo-Aryan language group, Hindi from the Central subgroup and Bengali from the Eastern. In these enlightened days, you can actually ask an online translation engine to give you Bengali and Hindi versions of the phrase “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.” The results are completely different:
| Bengali | Hindi |
| আমরা কিভাবে এই গো-হত্যাকারী ওয়াইনবিবারকে বিশ্বাস করব, আমার শিক্ষক? এমনকি একজন মুসলিম ও বহিরাগতদের জন্যও সে জঘন্য। | इस गौ-हत्यारे शराबी पर हम कैसे भरोसा कर सकते हैं, मेरे गुरु? एक मुसलमान और बहिष्कृत व्यक्ति के लिए भी वह नीच है। |
| Āmarā kibhābē ē’i gō-hatyākārī ōẏā’inabibārakē biśbāsa karaba, āmāra śikṣaka? Ēmanaki ēkajana musalima ō bahirāgatadēra jan’ya’ō sē jaghan’ya. | Is gau-hatyaare sharaabee par ham kaise bharosa kar sakate hain, mere guru? Ek musalamaan aur bahishkrt vyakti ke lie bhee vah neech hai. |
There is some similarity between the words for “cow-killer”, “gō-hatyākārī” in Bengali and “gau-hatyaare” in Hindi, and also between the words for “Muslim”, “musalima” in Bengali and “musalamaan” in Hindi, which perhaps is an indication that you shouldn’t mutter insults in a language that you’re not sure your interlocutor doesn’t understand. But otherwise, you’re probably safe using Bengali in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, which is where this scene is set.
Stirling may have got confused between Bengali and Urdu, the languages of the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now just Pakistan) respectively. Urdu is very similar to Hindi, to the point that ‘closely related’ may not convey the relationship strongly enough. However his fictional Angrezi Raj seems to have lost most of its Urdu speakers.
And these languages are not obscure – Hindi and Bengali have the fourth and fifth most native speakers in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English. I can’t imagine anyone writing, for instance, “The older man flicked a look at Sanchez’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Spanish and English are closely related.”
One can make the excuse for Stirling that online translation services were not available when he was writing the book. But encyclopedias certainly were, and you will find no encyclopedia that gives you reason to think that Bengali and Hindi are mutually intelligible. It’s fairly clear that he did not offer the draft for review to anyone with actual first-hand knowledge of Indian languages.
On another point, my eyebrows rose sharply in Chapter 23, when “Cassandra started wolfing down a fiery chicken Marsala”. No she didn’t. Marsala sauce, with an ‘r’, is made with the sweet wine of the same name and is not ‘fiery’. Masala, with no ‘r’, is a general term for an Indian spice mix, but usually not an especially hot one. If it is hot, its name is usually qualified with a particular set of ingredients, a ‘vindaloo masala‘ for instance.
And another thing: it’s a pet peeve of mine with other writers too, but the treatment of Russian is very inconsistent. Пожалуйста, “please”, is given as “pajalsta”, and Спасибо, “thank you” as “spacebo”; if I were being phonetic, I’d use “pazhal’sta” and “spasiba” to convey how they are actually pronounced by real Russian speakers, but usually in English writers use the standard transliterations, “pozhaluysta” and “spasibo”, even though they are a bit misleading. Yet at other points Stirling does use the standard transliteration, for example in Chapter 10 where we have the exchange “Govorite-li vy po-russki?” / “Da, govoryu. Kto vy takoy?” – “Do you speak Russian?” / “Yes, I do. And who are you?” If we were being phonetic, the first two vowels in говорите and говорю sound much more like short ‘a’ than short ‘o’, and the exchange is rather stilted anyway – “Vy govorite po-russki?” / “Da, a vy kto?” would be much more idiomatic. Though we are told it is the “High Formal mode” of Russian, for what that’s worth.
Incidentally the Russian-speaker is wearing a burqua rather than a burqa, and the military caste of India are the Kyashtria rather than the Kshatriya. Again, anyone who actually knows anything about Asian cultures will pick these up immediately.
These things do matter. If you are writing about other cultures, especially if you are writing in English about formerly colonised cultures in an alternate history where they have stayed colonised, it is important to show respect by getting at least basic language and cookery facts right.
Sorry to whine. Other readers, better informed on India than I am, have commented on other mistakes in the book, but those were the ones that jumped out at me.
I know that this book is beloved by many readers, but I’m afraid that I am not among them. You can get it here.
Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)