The Peshawar Lancers / S. M. Stirling

An alternate history from a guy who sent the entire island of Nantucket back in time in his latest series of books.

This one is a bit of Kipling, a bit of Haggard. It's nice.

I have found, with a lot of books in the alternate history genre, too much obediant love for a myth of royalty, tinged with a hint of Rand's John Galt. This isn't exactly uncommon in SF -- from the heroic engineers of Gernsback's era through Heinlein or Asimov's heroes, to a lot of current military SF (David Weber's books being a particular example). There's a scene in Tom Clancy's Patriot Games in which Jack Ryan sees Prince Frikkin Charles as a tough old ex-marine, instead of an inbred pampered scion. I feel the same kind of vague embarassment whenever I see a someone like Norman Schwarzkopf accept a knighthood. Uh, no, guy. You earned being called "General". Being called "Sir" is a mild slap in the face to the Republic. We don't have Knights and Counts and Barons here. We have Citizens, which is a better thing entirely.

In Stirling's book the New Raj Royals are uniformly heroic and full of noblesse oblige and other good things you would want in a parliamentary king-emperor. But it's hard to reconcile that concept with the actual history of the British throne, including the power-mad nuts, the religious nuts, and the plain old nuts. Basically, a group so generally combining bloodthirstiness with incompetence that even their own nobles had to stick the Magna Carta on their heads. And the current batch is basically only lauded when they die.

For all of that, Lancers is an enjoyable book, and a nice bit of world building.