What I hated about Peshawar Lancers was that it didn't give people the virtues of their flaws. There's a South African who is a racist, and an idiot, and he smokes... and all that's OK, but he's also a traitor and a coward, which is somehow too much piled on unnecessarily.

I can enjoy a good book with airships and the Raj as much as anyone, and I wanted to like it, but it kept on somehow cheating on its own terms, so I gave up on it profoundly dissatisfied.