SO I FINISHED S.M. STIRLING’S THEATER OF SPIES A WHILE BACK, and I realized I never posted any sort of review. Short version is I quite enjoyed it. It’s not as (perhaps overly) action-packed as the first book in the series, Black Chamber, which makes the espionage more realistic. Also, my mild frustration with the first book was that Stirling created his alternate USA, but the heroine spent most of her time doing things where we didn’t get a lot of the flavor of that alternate world. In this novel, you get a lot more of that sort of thing, which to me is half the fun of alternate-history novels. Recommended.

Now I’m rereading The Peshawar Lancers, which I’m liking just as much as the first time, and I wish that Stirling had written more novels in this setting.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Glenn, if you want to get the flavor of what Sarah Hoyt and Charlie Martin mean by ‘traditional publishing,’ the review on the Amazon page from Publisher’s Weekly of Peshawar Lancers is a perfectly gorge-buoying example.”

I hadn’t noticed that before, and boy is it awful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stirling weighs in in the comments below.