Rudyard Kipling

With The Night Mail A Story of 2000 A.D. Rudyard Kipling

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. These are included at the end of the book.