In The Footsteps Of Kim

"And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles - such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world."
-Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London, 2010), p. 58.

"...the white crushed stone of the military highway that snaked down from the Khyber Pass to Peshawar...Right now the Grand Trunk Road was thronged with the returning men and beasts of the Charasia Field Force, following the path trodden by generations of fighting men..."
-SM Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), p. 1.

I have not yet read to the end of page 1 of The Peshawar Lancers, nor will I at 1:08 am, but we are already deep in Kipling territory. Poul Anderson reproduces aspects of Kim a thousand years hence on another planet whereas Stirling takes us back to the Grand Trunk Road in an alternative twenty first century. In the Terran Empire of Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, they say, "Glory to the Emperor!" I will learn what it would be appropriate to say in the Angrezi Raj of Stirling's alternative history.