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With The Night Mail

Rudyard Kipling

Book Overview: 

Having achieved international fame with The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, Kim, and his Just So Stories, in 1905 Kipling serialized a thrilling science fiction novella, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D, in which the reader learns — while following the exploits of an intercontinental mail dirigible battling foul weather — about a planet-wide Aerial Board of Control, which enforces a rigid system of command and control not only in the skies (which are increasingly crowded with every manner of zeppelin) but in world affairs too.

Kipling got so excited by his own utopian vision that when the story first appeared in McClure's Magazine, it was accompanied by phony advertisements for dirigible and aeronautical products that he'd written, plus other ersatz magazine clippings. In one of these latter, we read that the Aerial Board of Control had effectively outlawed war in 1967 — by "reserving to every nation the right of waging war so long as it does not interfere with traffic and all that that implies."

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .foot lanes to themselves, but the foreigner in a hurry[15] is apt to take liberties with English air. "No. 162" lifts to a long-drawn wail of the breeze in the fore-flange of the rudder and we make Valencia (white, green, white) at a safe 7,000 feet, dipping our beam to an incoming Washington packet.

There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream round Dingle Bay show where the driven seas hammer the coast. A big S. A. T. A. liner (Société Anonyme des Transports Aëriens) is diving and lifting half a mile below us in search of some break in the solid west wind. Lower still lies a disabled Dane: she is telling the liner all about it in International. Our General Communication dial has caught her talk and begins to eavesdrop. Captain Hodgson makes a motion to shut it off but checks himself. "Perhaps you'd like to listen," he says.

"'Argol' of St. Thomas," the Dane[16] whimpers. "Report owners three starboard . . . Read More

Community Reviews

Got it as an ebook out of curiosity. It's a quick read so poses very little risk of time-wasting. Apparently there's an equally short sequel to it, but I'm not going to bother as I'm not impressed with this one. There is hardly any story line, and the little detail that can be fitted into such a sho

This is a seminal and influential work of Radium-Age science fiction by an unlikely author--Rudyard Kipling, perhaps best known as the man behind "The Man Who Would Be King" and "The Jungle Book."

Those familiar with Wellsian visions of world governments connected via airways crowded with dirigibles

Rudyard Kipling wrote many great poems about the past but here he sits at his desk in 1905 and figures what life is going to be like in the year 2000. And the future is

Dirigibles! Air ships!

Obviously not aeroplanes – the Wright brothers’ eccentric experiment had only taken place two years before, an

An interesting read. The faux science is detailed. In many respects typical Kipling but for me a rather superficial story in the end. I would have liked to see the ideas and the setting further explored in a more lengthy speculative work but a worthwhile read for me nevertheless. Good world building

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