With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.: By Rudyard Kipling - Illustrated

How is this book unique?

1. Font adjustments & biography included
2. Unabridged (100% Original content)
3. Illustrated

About With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. by Rudyard Kipling

"With the Night Mail" features the Aerial Board of Control, a fictional supranational organization created to manage air traffic for the whole world. able to limit the influence of national states and create a de-facto world government. Rudyard Kipling only wrote two science fiction stories, "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as ABC." Both are set in the same 21st century world. Plot: It is the year 2000, and - powered by 'Fleury's Ray' - a host of transatlantic aircraft, most of them lighter-than-air (airships), are flying across the air waves. The narrator is on board a mail plane, en route from London to Quebec. The technicalities of the journey, the expertise of the crew, the radio communications they use, and the international beacons which guide the traffic, are described in impressive detail, until the Night Mail docks safely at its Receiving Tower twenty minutes ahead of schedule. There then follows a riot of invention; mock “Notices to Airmen” (similar to the Admiralty ‘Notices to Mariners’, which Kipling knew well) with information on world-wide flying conditions, and several pages of advertisements for accessories, spares, job vacancies etc. for the aircraft industry. Reading it in an age in which intercontinental air travel is commonplace, one needs to bear in mind that the first successful powered flight had only taken place two years before, in 1903, and that the first flight across the English Channel was not accomplished until four years after the story was written.