 Cover of the book | |
| Author | Rudyard Kipling |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Frank Xavier Leyendecker, Henry Reuterdahl |
| Language | English |
| Series | Aerial Board of Control |
| Subject | mail, aeronautics, rescue |
| Genre | science fiction |
| Set in | 2000 A.D. |
| Published | March 1909 |
| Publisher | Doubleday, Page & Company |
| Publication place | US |
| Media type | Serialization (1905), Book (1909) |
| Followed by | "As Easy As A.B.C." |
"With the Night Mail" is a 1905 science fiction novella by Rudyard Kipling.
The story is set in the early 21st century and describes the Aerial Board of Control, a fictional supranational organization dedicated to the control and aid of airship traffic across the whole world. Kipling later elaborated this story element in the longer sequel story, "As Easy as ABC", set in the same universe.
A postal worker makes a night run to Quebec on the airship (dirigible) Postal Packet 162 with captain Purnall and his crew.
During the run, they encounter another airship in the lane reserved for mail but that is losing altitude. A mark boat is called for assistance, but it responds it cannot quit station. Purnall convinces the skip of the failing ship that the ship must be abandoned, and they witness the rescue operation carried out by a planet liner that has answered a general call and risen to the reserved lane. After the evacuation, the 162 attend to the now rapidly falling derelict by illuminating it, thus warning nearby ships of it.
After seeing the derelict fall into the ocean, the mark boat warns them of an approaching storm and advises them to steer towards Greenland. But the 162 instead holds course and steers right into a heavy storm, described by Kipling as "We were dragged hither and yon by warm or frozen suctions, belched up on the tops of wulli-was, spun down by vortices and clubbed aside by laterals under a dizzying rush of stars in the company of a drunken moon." By skillful navigation of crew member Tim, they ride out the storm and then exchange some words with A.B.C. man Williams on the mark boat.
Back en route to Quebec, Tim slides open the aft colloid to reveal the dawn and the sunrise. They witness a hospital boat, believed to be bound for Frederikshavn or one of the Glacier sanatoriums, and enjoy its morning hymn.
They arrive at their destination and Tim introduces the postman to his maiden, telling her that he has invited Williams from the Mark Boat to tea on Friday.
It was first published in McClure's Magazine in November 1905, and then in The Windsor Magazine in December 1905. In 1909 it was issued as a popular book by Doubleday, Page & Company, [1] slightly revised and with additional poetry and faux advertisements and notices from the future. It later appeared in the Kipling story collection Actions and reactions (1909).
From the low-arched expansion-tanks on either side the valves descend pillarwise to the turbine-chests, and thence the obedient gas whirls through the spirals of blades with a force that would whip the teeth out of a power-saw. Behind, is its own pressure held in leash or spurred on by the lift-shunts; before it, the vacuum where Fleury's Ray dances in violet-green bands and whirled turbillions of flame. The jointed U-tubes of the vacuum-chamber are pressure-tempered colloid (no glass would endure the strain for an instant) and a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches the Ray intently. It is the very heart of the machine—a mystery to this day. Even Fleury who begat it [...] could not explain how [it works] [...] If a speck of oil, if even the natural grease of the human finger touch the hooded terminals Fleury's Ray will wink and disappear and must be laboriously built up again. This means half a day's work for all hands and an expense of one hundred and seventy-odd pounds to the G. P. O. for radium-salts and such trifles.
Rudyard Kipling,"With the Night Mail" [1] (£170 in 1905 is equivalent to £23,058in 2023)
The story was illustrated by Frank X. Leyendecker, Henry Reuterdahl, and Henry Wright.
The overall theme strongly anticipated the much later genre of steampunk, with touches of valvepunk in the radium-sourced method of airship propulsion. Kipling's two A.B.C. stories have also been held up as the first examples of the use in science fiction of force-fields, streamed data-recording to tape, and the immense pulsing 'cloud-breaker' navigation beams that guide the world's airships can be seen as anticipating the laser. Charles Carrington [2] researched the radio technology of the time, and found that - even though there was then "no radio-telephony" - Kipling's story had envisioned complex air-traffic control by radio as... "a world-wide network of radio services, supplying weather forecasts, and allotting safety-levels, and landing priorities, thirty years before anyone else had dreamed of 'flying control'".
In terms of influence on other writers of the pre-war era the initial story pre-dates H.G. Wells's The War in the Air (1908) by three years, and presents a far more optimistic vision of the future. More generally the concept that air traffic would become widely used, and that some rational and impartial supra-national control of it was needed, is one that became a staple of pulp and 'scientifiction' as flight took wing in the 1930s.
The innovative approach of the "Night Mail" story, termed "indirect exposition" (or "incluing"), strongly influenced the style of the later post-war science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein.
The tales inspired a substantial role-playing game, Forgotten Futures, which had as its first source book The A.B.C. Files: A Role Playing Sourcebook For Kipling's Scientific Romance (1998). This is currently free and has a technical glossary and timeline drawn from the stories.
The corrected typescript of "With the Night Mail" was acquired at auction by the University of Sussex library in 1997. [3]
Marcus L. Rowland created a role-playing game series. The first entry was Forgotten Futures I: The A.B.C. Files first released in 1993. It uses the shareware approach, [4] and the whole series is available for download. [5]
American series Radio Tales published a radio drama, "Chicago 2065", which was an adaptation of "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as A.B.C.". It was first broadcast on 23 October 2001 via National Public Radio.
Forgotten Futures is a role-playing game created by Marcus Rowland to allow people to play in settings inspired by Victorian and Edwardian science fiction and fantasy. Most of its releases begin with these stories then add background material to explain the settings, adventures, and other game material.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
This is a bibliography of works by Rudyard Kipling, including books, short stories, poems, and collections of his works.
A Zeppelin is a type of rigid airship named after the German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century. Zeppelin's notions were first formulated in 1874 and developed in detail in 1893. They were patented in Germany in 1895 and in the United States in 1899. After the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the word zeppelin came to be commonly used to refer to all forms of rigid airships. Zeppelins were first flown commercially in 1910 by Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG), the world's first airline in revenue service. By mid-1914, DELAG had carried over 10,000 fare-paying passengers on over 1,500 flights. During World War I, the German military made extensive use of Zeppelins as bombers and as scouts. Numerous bombing raids on Britain resulted in over 500 deaths.
An airship is a type of aerostat or lighter-than-air aircraft that can navigate through the air flying under its own power. Aerostats use buoyancy from a lifting gas that is less dense than the surrounding air to achieve the lift needed to stay airborne.
"The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) is a story by Rudyard Kipling about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The story was first published in The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales (1888); it also appeared in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (1895) and numerous later editions of that collection. It has been adapted for other media a number of times.
The United Services College was an English boys' public school for the sons of military officers and civil servants, located from 1874 at Westward Ho! near Bideford in North Devon, from 1904 at Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and finally at Windsor, Berkshire. Almost all boys were boarders. The school was founded to prepare pupils for a career as officers in the armed services, many of them going on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, or the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.
Narrative exposition, now often simply exposition, is the insertion of background information within a story or narrative. This information can be about the setting, characters' backstories, prior plot events, historical context, etc. In literature, exposition appears in the form of expository writing embedded within the narrative.
Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, also known as The Jungle Book, is a 1994 American adventure film co-written and directed by Stephen Sommers, produced by Edward S. Feldman and Raju Patel, from a story by Ronald Yanover and Mark Geldman. It is a live-action adaptation of the Mowgli stories from The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) by Rudyard Kipling. Unlike its counterparts, the animal characters in this film do not talk.
The Norge was a semi-rigid Italian-built airship that carried out the first verified trip of any kind to the North Pole, an overflight on 12 May 1926. It was also the first aircraft to fly over the polar ice cap between Europe and America. The expedition was the brainchild of polar explorer and expedition leader Roald Amundsen, the airship's designer and pilot Umberto Nobile and the wealthy American adventurer and explorer Lincoln Ellsworth who, along with the Aero Club of Norway, financed the trip, which was known as the Amundsen-Ellsworth 1926 Transpolar Flight.
Perceval Landon (1869–1927) was an English writer, traveller and journalist, now best remembered for his classic and much reprinted ghost story "Thurnley Abbey".
The Aerial Board of Control is a fictional supranational organization dedicated to the control and aid of airship traffic across the whole world. It was first described in the science fiction novella by Rudyard Kipling, "With the Night Mail" (1905), and later in "As Easy as ABC" (1912.)
Dirigible is a 1931 American pre-Code adventure film directed by Frank Capra for Columbia Pictures and starring Jack Holt, Ralph Graves and Fay Wray. The picture focuses on the competition between naval fixed-wing and airship pilots to reach the South Pole by air.
Marcus L. Rowland is an English author in the field of role-playing games, particularly games with Victorian era content.
The America was a non-rigid airship built by Louis Mutin Godard in France in 1906 for the journalist Walter Wellman's attempt to reach the North Pole by air. Wellman first conceived of using a balloon to fly to the pole during a failed polar attempt by boat and sledge from Svalbard in 1894. He then visited Paris to review the state of balloon technology but left disappointed by the lack of acceptable steering and propulsion capability. A decade later while at the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Conference he learned of recent innovations in French dirigible design and believed a solution might be at hand for his Arctic aerial plan. After receiving the backing of newspaper publisher Victor F. Lawson, the Wellman Chicago Record-Herald Polar Expedition was announced, and Wellman traveled to Paris in search of a suitable design and manufacturer. In the meantime a public company was established to raise the $US 250,000 required for the expedition and airship.
The C-class blimp was a patrol airship developed by the US Navy near the end of World War I, a systematic improvement upon the B-type which was suitable for training, but of limited value for patrol work. Larger than the B-class, the C-class blimps had two motors and a longer endurance. Once again, the envelope production was split between Goodyear and Goodrich, with control cars being built by the Burgess division of Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. Originally the Navy ordered 30 but reduced the number to 10 after the armistice in November 1918. All ten of the "C" type airships were delivered in late 1918, and examples served at all of the Navy's airship stations from 1918 to 1922. In 1921, the C-7 was the first airship ever to be inflated with helium. The Navy decommissioned its last two remaining C-type blimps, the C-7 and C-9 in 1922.
Henry Reuterdahl was a Swedish-American painter highly acclaimed for his nautical artwork. He had a long relationship with the United States Navy.
The Pall Mall Magazine was a monthly British literary magazine published between 1893 and 1914. Begun by William Waldorf Astor as an offshoot of The Pall Mall Gazette, the magazine included poetry, short stories, serialized fiction, and general commentaries, along with extensive artwork. It was notable in its time as the first British magazine to "publish illustrations in number and finish comparable to those of American periodicals of the same class" much of which was in the late Pre-Raphaelite style. It was often compared to the competing publication The Strand Magazine; many artists, such as illustrator Sidney Paget and author H. G. Wells, sold freelance work to both.
George Valentine Williams was a journalist and writer of popular fiction.
The year 1905 was marked, in science fiction, by the following events.
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