Critical Thinking - Kipling 1

Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay, British India. His writings have influenced dozens of science fiction authors (more about that next week, hopefully), and there are two anthologies of his science fiction stories. But I’m going to have to go with Wikipedia on this one and say he only wrote two short stories that can categorically be considered sci fi.

The first is “With the Night Mail,” written for McClure’s magazine in 1904. (Although it wasn’t published until December of the next year. Just goes to show magazines have always been slow!) It’s told from the point of view of a journalist for the A.B.C.—the Aerial Board of Control. The year is 2000, and the unnamed narrator (which often suggests Kipling may have been assuming the role himself) is hitching a ride with the No. 162, a dirigible tasked with the nightly mail run between London and Quebec. While on its route, it encounters a sinking vessel, a massive electrical storm, and several other transports, both dirigible and submarine.

The second is “As Easy as A.B.C.,” written in 1912, and occurring in 2065, on my mother’s birthday, strangely enough. It transpires in the same universe as “With the Night Mail,” but the plot is more sociological than the technical bent of its predecessor. The A.B.C., which began as an international committee to regulate air travel, is now pretty much in charge of the whole world. “Transportation is Civilization, our motto runs.” A task force is sent to Chicago to defuse a politically volatile situation. After years of over-crowding and a horrible plague, people of the world are suspicious of crowds and the lack of privacy (which apparently means having to listen to anything they don’t agree with). Somehow, this developed into a fear of democracy. A group of about one-hundred “serviles” tries to convince the populace that voting and taking responsibility for one’s social leadership as a group is a good thing. The citizens not only disagree, they consider the whole thing a throw-back to a time of war and death. Crowds lead to mobs. Mobs lead to murder. The only safe recourse is to hole up on your own property and leave the leadership to the A.B.C.

First, the dirigibles. The first hot air balloon flew in 1783. The first rigid airship flew in the 1890s. In 1903, the Lebaudy brothers flew their airship 37 miles. A month later, the Wright Brothers showed up everybody with their powered heavier-than-air craft. Within a year, the Wright brothers flew 2.75 miles. I guess I can see why Kipling thought airships had more of a future than planes when he wrote "Night Mail" in 1904. Eight years later people were flying all over the place, but maybe he just liked steampunk.

Kipling mentions many innovations specific to dirigible flight. Light towers identify landmarks much like lighthouses at sea. “Cloudbreakers” clear clouds around the towers so pilots can see the lights. When faced with severe turbulence, crewmen don “inflaters” or “flickers”—rubber suits that inflate with air so you can be thrown about with minimal injury. Mark boats, large dirigibles that generally stay in one place over uninhabited areas, provide weather updates as well as a relatively safe mooring spot to ride out storms. Sanatorium ships with open-air decks cart consumptives to the cold, clean air of the Arctic in hopes of clearing their lungs. In “A.B.C.,” electrical currents paralyze people, preventing trespassing and other types of mischief. And field cultivators are remote control.

Then there’s the hand-wavium science. “Fleury’s gas” holds the airships aloft. Violent episodes of St. Elmo’s Fire endanger the ships when friction between the atmosphere and the skin of the vessels create electrical pyrotechnics. Shooting stars dissipate the excess electrical charge and can clear a storm within minutes.

Several other novelties proved more prophetic. Five years before Einstein laid down the foundation for the laser, a squadron of military airships scour a city with intense beams of light—“frozen lightening.” An airship boasts a real-time navigation chart—grandfather of the GPS. Acoustic warfare controls a crowd. Produce, meat, mail, and people are all transported by air on a regular basis. After the invention of celluloid, but before Plexiglas, “colloid” plates protect windows. And the A.B.C. board is equal-opportunity. The stories mention several times that women serve in leadership roles, although you don’t actually get to meet any.

Some social predictions went wide of the mark. A plague didn’t wipe out a great deal of the population. (Well, yet…) There are considerably more than 600 million people on the planet. Transportation regulation did not create a world government. But there are two quotes that I found interesting.

In “With the Night Mail,” Capt. Purnall looks down on the Cardiff-Bristol Double Lights (“those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth”) and notes, “Our planet’s overlighted if anything.” I wonder if that’s the first recorded speculation of light pollution.

Another occurs in “As Easy as A.B.C.” and has not yet come true, but may. As justification for documenting the story, the journalist-narrator remarks, “One knows that easy communications nowadays, and lack of privacy in the past, have killed all curiosity among mankind, but as the Board's Official Reporter I am bound to tell my tale.” Reality TV, Facebook, blogs, Youtube…I wonder if we’ll ever get to this point.

Links:
With the Night Mail – Notes
As Easy as A.B.C. – Notes

Be sure to check out the “ads,” original to the first printing of With the Night Mail.

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Critical Thinking is a mostly-weekly article that is still trying to define itself. Probably more book/author analysis than Geek Fu. If you have something you think would fit, please attach it to a laptop computer loaded with the latest version of Microsoft Office and email it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with “Critical Thinking” in the subject line. (Yes, I have been listening to too much Car Talk.)