2025 read #29: With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling.

With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with Extracts from the Contemporary Magazine in Which It Appeared) by Rudyard Kipling

Illustrated by Frank X. Leyendecker and H. Reuterdahl

87 pages

Published 1909 (first serialized 1905)

Read March 20

Rating: 3 out of 5

This year, I’d hoped to shift my reading habits away from “log as many books as possible” and toward “read what I actually want to read.” I’d been doing pretty well on that account until February 13. In the month between then and March 14, I finished just three books. It’s been difficult to fend off the instinct to make up for lost time since then. Hence a bunch of manga and poetry books, which I certainly don’t regret reading, but I also can’t deny I read them mostly to shore up my numbers.

This odd little book falls into the category of “a quick read that I’ll forget in a day or two,” yes, but it’s both an early example of science fiction and an early attempt at in-universe fictional documentation.

In the year 2000, the brave men of the GPO ferry mail across oceans and continents via dirigible. Kipling pioneers the technobabble-forward style still recognizable today in Analog; his narrator drops acronyms and specs with little concern for anyone who isn’t versed in the technology of the distant year 2000. While our narrator gets a tour (and we get an overview of the workings of the airship), the captain emphatically condemns the shoddiness of German manufacturing, proving the limits of British imagination.

For all its dry technicality, Night Mail surprises with occasional poetry of description, matter-of-fact snapshots of life in the airlanes:

She falls stern first, our beam upon her; slides like a lost soul down that pitiless ladder of light, and the Atlantic takes her.

I enjoyed the vibe of this brief piece, which I would describe as something like early space opera before it went to space: taut, skillful captains from all “Internationalities” piloting the dark beneath the stars, with the stalwarts of the Aërial Board of Control on hand to direct and rescue shipping.

It isn’t much of a story, beyond the vibes. But what makes the novella particularly interesting to me is the supplemental material “extracted” from the in-universe magazine that supposedly “published” the tale: shipping bulletins, book reviews, reader correspondence, advertisements. It’s a charming conceit that adds to the story’s universe.