Rackham And One Other

SM Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003).

We already know something of Disraeli, Kipling and the painter Leighton after the Fall. See here. Now we learn that Arthur Rackham illustrated Legends From Lost Homeland and that a certain author:

was born in the old Empire;
came to India with the Exodus;
said that, when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth;
believed that he could photograph fairies;
wrote escapist detective stories "...set in a paradisal world where the Fall had never happened..." (p. 24).

Paradisal indeed! So the post-Fall Imperialists read the same Sherlock Holmes stories that we do! Maybe fiction writers, like the Sisterhood of True Dreamers, can tune into alternate realities? (-which is how DC Comics explained their different versions of Superman: a version that was fiction on one Earth was real on another and there is, unlikely though it seems, one Earth with not a single superhero.)

Imperialist physics approaches the idea that reality is fundamentally not deterministic but probabilistic. Cassandra (!) King speculates that the human brain is compact yet complex enough to "...operate at or around that level..." (p. 245), thus explaining the Russians' ability to breed human beings able to sense alternative probabilities. The novel's two premises are a single premise after all.

There is church-state conflict in the Russian Empire because Count Ignatieff, devotee of a god of destruction, conceals the approaching end of the world from his political masters who would surely want to prevent it.

It can no longer be doubted that this is excellent post-Anderson sf.