Category Archives: Kipling

Hamilton and Kipling

08 Thursday Sep 2022

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If you want a taste of what Weird Tales readers found so alluring about ‘star’ author Edmond Hamilton, his “The Metal Giants” (Weird Tales, December 1926) is now a new one-hour reading on Librivox.

Lovecraft called the crowd-pleasing formula writer “indefatigable & repetitious” and he assured a correspondent that, if he were to enter the field of ‘interplanetary fiction’… “you may depend upon it that I shall not choose Edmond Hamilton [as a model]”. That said, in 1926 Lovecraft did admire his “The Monster-God of Mamurth” tale, and I recall that they met at some point and got on well. He was also surprised to find he liked the Hamilton tale “Child of the Winds” in the May 1936 Weird Tales (“Hamilton(!!)” he exclaimed in a letter).

While searching for the name, I found more evidence for the influence of Kipling’s seminal “With The Night Mail” on science-fiction…

“… an article in the February 1922 Science and Invention, ‘10,000 Years Hence’. Howard Brown provided a stunning illustration of floating health cities (like huge health farms) kept aloft in the upper atmosphere by power rays drawing their energy from the sun. Gernsback described how these cities could be directed to move around the Earth [keeping pace with the sun], a concept one might believe inspired two later noted works of science fiction, Edmond Hamilton’s “Cities in the Air” (1929) and James Blish’s Earthman, Come Home (1955), were it not that neither author knew of the article.”

The above is from the pulp/early SF survey book The Time Machines, Liverpool University Press, which does not mention Kipling even once.

Ah, but these authors would have known of Kipling, the obvious source for such ideas. The direct inspiration being drawn from “With The Night Mail” will be obvious to anyone who has read it. Kipling’s cloud-breakers + permanently aloft sun-powered airships = “Cities in the Air”. Kipling’s giant and ascending ‘consumptive’ hospital airships = hospital cities in the upper atmosphere.

Since the article and Hamilton’s “Cities in the Air” (much enjoyed by pulp readers of the time, it seems) are now public domain, they might even be overhauled and retro-fitted to fit with Kipling’s “With the Night Mail” / Aerial Board of Control universe. In fact, much else that was published in the 11 issues of Gernsback’s short-lived Air-Wonder Stories seems on the face of it to be fair game for such a thing.

On Kipling as an influence on 20th century SF writers

07 Wednesday Sep 2022

Posted by in Kipling, Odd scratchings

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Kipling was… “the first modern science fiction writer” — John W. Campbell, editor of the seminal Astounding magazine and pioneer of hard science-fiction.

What Kipling was doing in “With the Night Mail”… “had never been done before. There is no such subtlety in the contemporary proto-SF of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. I think we may safely credit him with inventing the style of exposition that was to become modern SF’s most important device for managing and conveying information about imaginary futures”. — “Rudyard Kipling Invented SF!”, by Eric S. Raymond.

“With The Night Mail”… “anticipated the style and expository mechanics of Campbellian hard science fiction fourteen years before Hugo Gernsback’s invention of the ‘scientifiction’ genre and twenty-seven years before Heinlein’s first publication.” Eric S. Raymond, A Political History of SF (2000).

“With The Night Mail” is… “an amazing tour-de-force of inspired genius […] the sort of thing that Verne or Wells would never have dreamed of doing […] Kipling, in 1905, is doing things that science fiction as a genre wouldn’t achieve until Robert Heinlein arrived in the late 1940s.” — Bruce Sterling.

Kipling… “is for everyone who responds to vividness, word magic, sheer storytelling.” — Poul Anderson.

Kipling was… “a master of our art.” — Gordon R. Dickson.

“He was a superb and painstaking craftsman, the most completely well-equipped writer of short stories ever to tackle that form in the richest of languages.” … “”With the Night Mail” is an astounding vision … his influence on 20th century SF writers was probably greater than anyone else’s, except Wells … he was a master at making the fantastic seem credible”. — John Brunner.

“When you read Kipling, you’re there, [he] builds a total sensory impression that surpasses the language” [which is partly why he will never be taught in schools] — C.J. Cherryh.

“what a good writer he was … the work is superb and he could make words sing. [On looking into the leftist political claims that had dissuaded me from reading him,] I found that most of his supposed sins had been vastly overstated.” — George R.R. Martin.

At SF conventions… “I found that so many SF writers could see his sterling merit that I felt vindicated” [in my early love of Kipling, despite my mundane Eng. Lit. teachers who ignored him] — Anne McCaffrey.

Heinlein was also strongly influenced by the “Night Mail” style and viewpoint, but I can as yet find no quote from him on this point.

New book: Copiously annotated and corrected edition of “With The Night Mail”

28 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by in Kipling, New books, New discoveries, Scholarly works

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Newly published, my labour-of-love “With the Night Mail”, annotated edition. Available now as a .PDF file. $2 on Gumroad, but the first 30 Tentaclii readers can get it free by using coupon-code tentaclii at the checkout. Or if you’ve feeling generous, you can pay the $2 and skip the coupon. I’m hoping that this Gumroad ‘formula’ may eventually start to produce a much-needed bit of extra income.

Blurb:

This is the best version of Kipling’s famous “With The Night Mail” (1905), the first ‘hard’ science-fiction story. Still a fabulous steampunk read, today.

Here newly and fully annotated with 4,600 words of precise scholarly annotations. Several important new discoveries are made, including the identity of “little Ada” — she was a real pilot! All four earliest versions have been checked and cross-referenced, and the modern corrupted text has been carefully cleaned. Differences between editions are noted in the footnotes.

There are 145 footnotes, explaining the technology, lingo, and places. One footnote even discovers a long ‘new’ section of dialogue about the risk of plague, unseen since the first publications in 1905 — and never reprinted until now!

This .PDF is thus as close as we will get to a definitive version of the seminal story that launched the entire genre of hard science-fiction, and which opened the highly influential Gollancz yellow-jacket survey anthology One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1969).

As a bonus, there are four new full-page colour illustrations including one of “George”. This labour-of-love e-book is 28 pages in total, delivered to you as a .PDF file. It may interest RPG gamers, as well as scholars and readers.

As you can tell, I’ve at last been able to see all four of the earliest editions. And my gosh… many differences! And with errors in places, in some modern editions, even including a handful in the free version on the site of The Kipling Society. Anyway, regular Tentaclii readers know my approach… copious attention to detail, deep historical research, resulting in many fascinating footnotes. Enjoy.

The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century

31 Tuesday May 2022

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Online Books recently catalogued The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, which it had spotted in a nice clean .TXT version at Gutenberg. A fascinating curiosity, it seems, is Mrs. Loudon’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827). A lively proto-steampunk and partly aerial adventure by all accounts, albeit stretching over three volumes. And perhaps thus a possibility for adaptation to expand Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control (“With the Night Mail”) universe, on which Tentaclii has had several posts.

Three volumes is a bit daunting though. Has it been abridged? Yes, it has, “The only modern edition is abridged” says L.W. Currey, but doesn’t name the edition. Amazon reveals this as a “University of Michigan Press; Abridged edition (1995)”, aka “Ann Arbour”. Google Books reveals it was a paperback and also “illustrated”.

The SF Encyclopedia has “one of the very earliest Proto SF texts … a somewhat melodramatic plot”. Sounds great, and apparently lots of early sci-fi inventiveness too.

The SF Encyclopedia perhaps usefully comments on the University of Michigan edition is a “much cut bowdlerization”, basing this on one negative review. Some 100 pages cut and touches of new smoothing added at the joins, it seems. I’m fine with that, for reading enjoyment rather than scholarship. If the feminists who claim her (very much ‘in passing’) want to produce a sumptuous critical edition of the three volume table-trembler, then go ahead.

It looks like the abridged University of Michigan edition sells for £30 on eBay, and would be tricky to get via Amazon. Since there’s Amazon’s usual utter confusion on editions, and you might end up buying some public domain shovelware you could get free elsewhere.

Archive.org refuses a search for “The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century”, presumably because of the ! mark, and has “No results matched your criteria” for “A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century” in the title. So it’s difficult to compare editions there. But eventually, via Google and then an author search, deep down the Archive.org results (she wrote a lot about gardening after her marriage to a botanist) one finds the University of Michigan Press edition is available to borrow.

Also there is an 1828 second edition of the three-volume work: I, II, and III. But Gutenberg’s clean .TXT compilation of all three volumes will be preferred for some e-ink devices such as the original Kindle 3. This, together with judicious skimming, is perhaps the best option for reading.

I should also note the 18 hour LibriVox recording, which again is a bit daunting.

It never seems to have been adapted for media or comics.

I’m not alone in only just hearing about this novel. A 2018 blog post by Gothic Wanderer (not linked due to absolutely massive plot spoilers) remarks that she is vastly superior to Mary Shelley. And, yet despite being claimed by feminists…

The novel has received almost no critical attention. I have spent twenty years reading and studying Gothic fiction and yet I only learned of the novel’s existence in the last year. It is time for it to be studied more.

S.T. Joshi observes, in his weighty survey Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, that Loudon does not share Shelley’s radical politics — which may perhaps explain some of the neglect. Joshi also points up a few of the horror passages, before passing on to Poe in his survey of early mummies.

It seems that Lovecraft and his circle did not know the novel.

On the little-considered ‘airplane novel’ genre

02 Thursday Dec 2021

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Having recently become enamoured of Kipling’s classic “With the Night Mail” and his Aerial Board of Control universe, I was interested to see that Quillette has a long new survey of the genre of the airplane novel. Exploring especially how it was blown off-course in response to terrorist events…

Gone are the days when aviator/authors such as Nevil Shute and Ernest K. Gann and Paul Beaty wrote about airplane travel as if it were an almost spiritual experience. That type of novel lost its hold on the public’s imagination when men […] began boarding airplanes with a nefarious purpose in mind. The golden age of hijacking only lasted from 1965–1972, but its impact on popular culture endures.

I’d add that Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” might be considered to be, in part, among the ‘airplane tales’ of the 1930s. But there the ‘spiritual experience’ of height and far-sight is flipped into horror.

I guess, in a way, that the 1970s ‘turn’ in the genre then subtly opened a way for the nascent steampunk to offer a home for the old and vanished ‘romance of air-travel’. If only with dirigibles, zeppelins, balloons and personal ‘fliers’ of various kinds.

Also new on Archive.org. in a Loompanics book from the 1980s, the opposite. A chapter surveying the key examples of The Inner World in Fiction. ‘Inner World’ here meaning various non-horror ideas of subterranean realms under the earth.

Forgotten Futures: an Aerial Board of Control RPG

08 Monday Nov 2021

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Further to my interest in Kipling’s A.B.C. universe I’ve now found an Aerial Board of Control RPG from 1993 (revised 1998), set in the alternative world of his “Night Mail” future airship semi-utopia. It’s now free online as Forgotten Futures I: The A.B.C. Files and weighs in at 52,000 words. Also the core Forgotten Futures rulebook, and other similar source books from which to mix and match ideas are to be found here. Useful for writers wanting to write in the A.B.C. universe as well, I’d suggest, what with history, timelines and character generator sheets and all. Author Mark Rowland welcomes PayPal donations.

He had previous done RPGs such as Call of Cthulhu: Nightmare In Norway, which appear to feature trolls that turn out to be a cross between the Martense clan in “The Lurking Fear” and Wells’s Morlocks. His Forgotten Futures series appears to be well-regarded by the RPG crowd and was covered this summer by the 40-minute podcast The GROGNARD Files…

Marcus L Rowland take us on a tour on his works, and the ways that it has been distributed during its years of production.

As Easy as A.B.C

08 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Kipling, Scholarly works

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Following my recent post on Kipling’s classic early science-fiction “With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.” (1905, written 1904) I was pleased to find the sequel on YouTube: “As Easy as A.B.C: A Tale of 2150 A.D.” (1912 two-part serial, written circa 1907, in book form 1917). Comparing the two titles might make you think the sequel moves ahead by 150 years. It did, at least for the serial magazine publication. But as the authoritative Kipling Society says, Kipling later rolled the date back to 2065.

The year 2000 is an orderly world of high-technology, in which the British Empire appears to have been untroubled by either world war. The Empire has imperceptibly shrunk and morphed into the relatively light-touch global Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.). A sort of ‘Commonwealth of the Air’, melded with a global Post Office and Merchant Shipping Service and in efficient charge of the world’s commerce and communications.

Heinlein is said to have been strongly influenced by the overall style of the first story, which was a huge ‘hard sci-fi’ breakthrough for its time. This second story is less serious in tone, probably Kipling’s wise choice. The wry humour sweetens the digestion of a clutch of grim themes.

[Spoilers follow]

By 2065 the A.B.C. has become a no-nonsense world government of-a-kind, with a garden-city London as the capital. It is efficient and incorruptible, partly because a kind of libertarian affluence is now ubiquitous and no-one can be bothered by such hard work. Human “executive capacity” has anyway become so hard to find, in a world in which a plague has reduced the global population to some 500 million, that the A.B.C could not rule the world even if they wanted to. The supine 1920s League of Nations or aggressive 1930s Axis it is not, and the A.B.C. ably services a world in which a plague has caused people to become nomadic and extremely averse to crowds and public touching, and to largely live very private and isolated lives. Under the benign oversight of the A.B.C. the world’s people can seemingly go anywhere they like, affluent and seasonally flitting from place to place in their fliers in search of privacy. Robot-like machines work the farm fields. So long as they do not interfere with commerce or the food supply or badger their neighbours, the tall and long-lived people of the time seem free to go live where they want. Think wild camping, gone high-tech glamping with airships, and with healthy ‘social distancing’ enforced by genetically-engineered screens of super-fast growing trees.

There are of course a tiny number of remaining anti-civilisation luddites, short and aged-looking and emotion-fuelled. Their cult-like groups flare up rarely in places such as the re-forested farming backwater of Chicago, where they aggressively agitate for the old ways and annoy the hell out of normal people. They can sometimes be reasoned out of their madness (as Russia tries to do), or can be persuaded to go about their amusingly primitive ways in a quasi-zoo akin to our ‘living museum’ format.

In terms of the technology Kipling’s ideas about a future ‘world-government based on airpower’ would become a commonplace by the 1930s (the later Wells, etc). Kipling’s original airship utopia had already gone beyond such things (“war went out of fashion”), though a small airship fleet armed with crowd pacifier-rays and sonic-stunners is maintained in case of need.

The talk of “plague” in the second tale throws a rather ghoulish back-light on the ‘isolated Greenland sanitariums’ of the first tale, and perhaps tells us why the airship crew solemnly ‘doffed their caps’ as the hospital ship passed in the dawn. In the second tale there are hints that the plague was linked to a tuberculosis that had developed in the abhorred “crowds” of the old world, who had once engaged in endless “talking” and “touching” due to their “settled living” in one place. There are hints that the Aerial Board of Control’s real problems for the post-2065 future will arise from other factors. The dwindling world birthrates in a post-plague world. The ennui and growing lack of curiosity among small-enclave populations, most still living in a plague-defence mindset. The obsessive yearning for privacy in a world of ubiquitous communication and open travel. It all sounds rather familiar.

Though it should be said that there is one strong hint that the birthrate problem will have a technological solution, so this is not a doomed ‘Radium Age’ civilisation, just one with its own interlocking set of problems to solve. Kipling seems there to be setting himself up for a third story. Yet he wrote no other A.B.C. tales, and not a single later author appears to have adopted Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control universe.

Anyway, I was pleased to find “A.B.C.” available on YouTube. Several other YouTubers have it but in a rather poor bathtub Librivox recording.

For those wanting a text to work from for their own audio production, note that The SF Encyclopedia warns that “Night Mail” is presented “incomplete” in the volume Kipling’s Science Fiction (Tor, 1992), though doesn’t state why or what was cut. I can see no problem with the first story. Perhaps the commenter was not aware of the marked differences to be found between the two 1905 versions, and again with the 1909 version. The British 1905 version has a section of about 20 lines entirely missing from later printings, for instance.

For those wanting the original art, Marcus L. Rowland’s free PDF edition of both tales collects the various original illustrations/paintings and also has the original surrounding…

weather advisories, classified advertisements, shipping notices, and a wide range of other snippets, intended to suggest that the tale was in fact appearing in a magazine published in 2000.

Some of these are delightfully humorous and also informative, so don’t skip them in the audiobook.

With The Night Mail

26 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by in Kipling, Podcasts etc.

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The latest edition of Sensor Sweep sent me in search of a good audiobook of Kipling’s famous proto-steampunker long story “With The Night Mail” (1905, expanded 1909). Surprisingly difficult to find on YouTube in a good reading, and Librivox search ‘knows nurthing…’. Though Librivox does actually have it, which alerts me that their keyword search is obviously duff. Even a search for kipling night doesn’t pick it up. Librivox’s one reading turns out to be echoing and not ideal, though you might fix it up in an audio editor.

But that matters not, since trusty old Archive.org brings a good result. Patrick Stacey’s version from 2020, a one-hour reading complete with “enhanced with original music and sound effects” and which he made and uploaded himself. Super. I might even recommend it in the November edition of Digital Art Live. Though there is a bit rather awkwardly cut out at 45:20 minutes, the “Rimouski drogher” section. I can see why that was cut, but the vital description of the Mark Boat and the meteorite has also gone with it.

It was in print in the U.S. McClure’s Magazine, November 1905, the first publication — unless the British magazine that published it a month later was perhaps on the news-stands before its December cover-line. It anticipated a great many new technologies, from radio to air-traffic to medical (30 year has been added to the average lifespan). Here the story is deemed set in “June 2025” rather than 2000, and opens slightly differently. There are other small differences compared to the 1909 and 1915 book versions, and the sequel opens with a quote from the original that makes yet another small change.

William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919)

02 Saturday May 2020

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S. T. Joshi’s blog has updated. He’s rescued sixteen of the best weird stories by the first William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919), the post-1892 owner of The Pall Mall Gazette in London. These are now published in a new 358-page volume titled The Ghosts of Austerlitz and Others. It has a Kindle edition nicely priced at a mere $4, and has a Joshi-penned biography of Astor.

The Pall Mall Gazette is a familiar name to anyone who has looked into the early life of H.G. Wells. Under Astor’s new ownership, and the conservative editorship of his new editor Henry Crust, the Gazette provided a congenial home for paid essays and humour pieces by the impoverished H.G. Wells at an absolutely crucial time in his pre-fame career. If Wells had not had a bare living from the post-1892 Gazette under William Waldorf Astor, we might not have had The Time Machine in 1894-95 — and the history of science-fiction could have looked very different.

I seem to recall the Gazette also published Kipling, and that there was an anthology a year ago of various strange stories gleaned from the Gazette. Presumably Astor’s liking for the weird made it a congenial home for the likes of Wells, Kipling and others. More on such matters will no doubt be found in Joshi’s biographical essay.

The Wikipedia portrait of Astor at the end of his life is not at all flattering. So here is my repaired, enlarged and colourised picture of him in his prime. Here he might be aged around age 42-ish — about the time when he purchased the Gazette.

Joshi’s new blog post also has new news on the ongoing series of annotated Lovecraft letters…

Later this year we should be publishing Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others (including letters to Arthur Harris, James Larkin Pearson, Winifred V. Jackson, Arthur Leeds, and Paul J. Campbell).

Wormwood #31

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Doyle, Kipling, New books, Scholarly works

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Wormwood #31 has been published by Tartarus at £10.

Likely to be of most interest to readers of this blog is “The Dark and Decadent Dreams of Doctor Doyle” by Paul M. Chapman, on Conan Doyle’s non-Holmes tales in which… “His work often echoed Poe’s ‘love for the grotesque and the terrible’”.

Looking back over other issues of the last few years, I also see that #26 had a similar survey essay for Kipling, “The Strange and the Supernatural in the Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling” by Colin Insole.