S. M. Stirling made his reputation by writing alternate histories, starting with his Draka novels, which combined standard alternate history with a detailed portrait of a grimly authoritarian dystopia. But much of his fiction since then might be called “alternate alternate history”: It appeals to the same time-frame of readers, but it does so with a different starting point than a simple might-have-been past event. His Nantucket Island series, for example, followed the lead of L. Sprague de Camp's classic Lest Darkness Fall, plunging not one twentieth-century man, but an entire twentieth-century island into the historical past, where the islanders' struggles to survive created a new historical timeline. His latest series, beginning with Dies the Fire, in effect plunged the entire twentieth-century world into the past, as some unknown force altered the laws of physics on Earth so that electric power sources, combustion engines, and explosives all stopped working, forcing the human race to return to medieval technology to survive—and killing off the overwhelming majority of humanity.

Stirling's latest novel, The Sunrise Lands, explores this premise further, taking up the story a generation later. This is the first volume of a new trilogy. Some of the events it portrays suggest that subsequent volumes will actually reveal the hidden agents responsible for shutting down human technology. This may also explain the event at the start of the Nantucket Island series, as Dies the Fire began with reports of the strange phenomena leading to Nantucket's return to the Bronze Age, as seen from outside. There are small discrepancies between the two trilogies—Ian Arnstein, a central character in the Nantucket novels, describes himself as a widower, yet his divorced wife Pam turns up alive and well halfway through Dies the Fire—but these are probably a minor auctorial memory lapse, rather than a hint that the starting points are two almost identical parallel Earths, or, more mundanely, that Ian Arnstein was lying about his past.

The first trilogy in this setting showed people turning to older customs and beliefs for survival. This second trilogy carries the process further; it's very nearly a fantasy novel, with a mystical vision leading to an epic quest across the desolated landscape of North America. Its worldbuilding has a fantasy-like quality as well, with newly emerged peoples occupying the old landscape; one of the earlier novels explicitly referred to ethnogenesis, the emergence of new peoples out of times of troubles, and ethnogenesis seems to be one of this novel's themes. An even closer fit, though, might be Poul Anderson's portrayal of successor societies in his classic Orion Shall Rise. Stirling gives us the new societies of Oregon—a feudal quasi-empire based in Portland, a neo-Celtic and mostly pagan clan, a more benign feudalism with Nordic cultural roots, and a city-state run by a university, among others—but adds several more: the Mormon community of New Deseret, a claimant to the presidency of the United States based in Boise, and the apparent villains of the piece, a charismatic religious despotism called the Church Universal and Triumphant, based in Montana, along with more distant communities in the interior. His plot takes nine young men and women (the traditional number for a quest, as one of them observes) from Oregon into the interior, on the first leg of a transcontinental journey, and into the midst of a war and a coup d'etat. The book ends with Stirling's “fellowship” being scattered by their enemies, with several of them in need of rescue.

The Tolkienian inspiration for all this is obvious, and Stirling points it up for the reader familiar with Tolkien, especially through one of the emergent new societies consciously modeled on Tolkien's Dunedain, two of whose people are participants in the quest. There's a fair bit of Tolkien's invented elven language Sindarin in this book, and some jokes about it, such as a scene involving a Sindarin translation of “The Ballad of Eskimo Nell,” a famous traditional bawdy song. But there are other literary references as well. The soldiers of Boise sing a heroic ballad that's almost a direct quotation from Thomas Babington Macaulay's “Lays of Ancient Rome”—which may not be quite plausible but neatly points up the Roman inspiration of the successor state in Boise. The Portland Protective Association draws on Arthurian legends, but also on the actual history of Norman feudalism. Stirling's world is full of splinter cultures based on various literary works.

It's noteworthy that most of these societies preserve core American values; notably, they have freedom of religion—the pagan MacKenzies don't expel or forcibly convert Christians, and the Central Oregon Ranchers' Association, which might be expected to have turned to fundamentalism, also endorses freedom of religion and accepts pagan immigrants. On the other hand, established churches are found in the equivocally evil Portland Protective Association and the unequivocally monstrous Church Universal and Triumphant. Stirling's people may live in a medieval world, but they don't live by medieval values. They're still heirs of the Enlightenment. This same heritage shows up in the reliance of most of these societies on citizen armies, where every adult has weapons and a measure of training—though that has actual medieval precedents, in the English yeoman with his longbow, and the comparatively free societies in this world encourage skill in archery for the same reasons the English did.

So this is a good adventure story, with interesting fantastic elements, and with a well-worked out background and some entertaining little jokes. And it also has serious themes, ranging from the emergence of new societies out of the fall of a previous civilization to the preservation of rationality and liberty as human values. In effect, Stirling is retelling the story of the fall of Rome, with the United States in the role of Rome, but with the survivors having a chance to get things right this time. The story that results was well worth reading, and promises interesting developments in the rest of this second trilogy.