Awesome, awesome writing! I particularly enjoyed the stories anthropomorphizing the ship and the train. This guy had vision and imagination galore! I agree with editor John Brunner that his story about"too much democracy" is misunderstood--it's difficult to understand his meaning. ( )

review of
Rudyard Kipling & John Brunner's
The Science Fiction Stories of Rudyard Kipling
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 29, 2013

I read this largely b/c I've been preoccupied w/ authors I read as a kid & w/ bks that're take-offs of other bks. As a child I read Kipling's The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, & Captains Courageous. I've been planning to read a take-off on the latter called Captains Outrageous & reading this Kipling SF bk seemed like a good transition. I lost interest in Kipling when I was very young except for, perhaps, an enduring love for the feral narrative exemplified by The Jungle Book & didn't really have any high hopes for this bk - probably b/c Kipling's association w/ British colonized India overly associates him w/ imperialism for me. Nonetheless, I hoped I'd find it an astonishing surprise.. but I didn't.

However, the editor, John Brunner, purveys an infectious enthusiasm & gives valuable scholarly intros to each story. In fact, I liked Brunner's input so much I went out & bought the 6 bks I cd find by him at local used bookseller. Even tho his is a name I've known for decades, I've never read anything by him. A capsule review from the Washington Post Book World on the back cover has this to say: "The equal of Wells and the superior of Verne". Well! Them's fightin' words - & I can't say I agree. SO, I went out & got 8 Verne bks today - none of wch had I previously heard of. 1st off, Wells & Verne were novelists & Kipling's SF is all short stories - so such comparisons are ridiculous.

Most of these Kipling stories strike me as less fantastic, wch is what much Verne & Wells is, & more short excursions inspired by studies of specific technical details. Kipling's preoccupation w/ what was then fairly new technology gets him into travel stories. But even there I think Verne, particularly, was way ahead of him. Who Kipling reminds me of the most is Poe & there's a bk called The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe that I think wd be worth reading in comparison. But Poe was writing 50 or 60 yrs before Kipling. STILL, I enjoyed these stories somewhat & was glad to read them given that I'd previously thought of Kipling as more of an adventure writer.

Brunner's bio intro made me like Kipling all the more. The 1st paragraph reads:

"In a book by David Frost entitled I Could Have Kicked Myself, a compilation of decisions that their makers lived to regret, it is asserted that in 1869 the editor of the San Francisco examiner sacked Rudyard Kipling from his job as a cub reporter, saying, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."

"Which was, I suppose, scarcely surprising, since at the time RK was rather less than five years old." (p ix)

"He was the first British author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature" [..] "He was twice offered, twice refused,a knighthood." (p ix) That latter makes me trust & like him more - even w/o knowing his reasons. "To the end of his days he retained his admiration, dating from his late teens, for the tough hard-headed individualist" (p xi) I can relate to that. "He was made much of in London, but despite his many acquaintances felt desperately lonely until he fell in with a young American named Wolcott Balestier. They became close friends and even collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka." (p xi) That got me curious, not that many writers collaborate, I'd like to read it. Kipling settled on his wife's family's estate in "Vermont. The next few years ensured that America became the second greatest influence on his work, after India." (p xi) Didn't know that!

"[H]e was so famous and indeed so beloved a writer that when, at the same time, Pope Leo XIII also fell ill, the Pall Mall Gazette issued posters with the headline KIPLING AND POPE - in that order." (p xii) I don't think these stories are what put him in that category. "He was a baffling, paradoxical man: fiercely patriotic, yet among the keenest and most unrelenting critics of his country; an advocate of Empire, who made no secret of his lifelong affection and respect for those whom others casually dismissed as "wogs" or worse; a man of letters whose greatest admiration was reserved for men of action" (p xiii)

In the 1st story, "A Matter of Fact", there's casual mention of "raining frogs" - something I expect more from Charles Fort. Has anyone reading this ever seen a rain of frogs? I haven't.. but I'd like to.. An interesting twist in this 1st story is that there's pity for the sea serpent's travails rather than terror & repulsion. This 1st story, again, reminds me of Poe - but the 2nd & 3rd stories use anthropomorphosis of machines to make technical description more entertaining - & I don't think Poe wd've done that:

""Good business," said the high-pressure cylinder. "Whack her up, boys. They've given us five pounds more steam"; and he began humming the first bars of "Said the Young Obadiah to the Old Obadiah," which, as you may have noticed, is a pet tune among engines not built for high speed. Racing liners with twin-screws sing "The Turking Patrol" and the overture to the "Bronze Horse," and "Madame Angot," till something goes wrong, and then they render Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette," with variations.

""You'll learn a song of your own some fine day," said the Steam, as he flew up the foghorn for one last bellow." (p 27)

TB features in 2 or 3 of the stories - showing how prevalent, & incurable, it was in Kipling's day. Spiritism is given an interesting twist in a story where Keats is channelled or paralleled under similar conditions to Keats' own - as an analog to radio. & in Unprofessional, Kipling takes a similar hypothetical stand vis a vis astronomy as I do in my 1st bk (in wch I wrote: "anything is a microcosm of everything / therefore, 1 can read a palm / (e g) / & derive the same info as if reading everything / re / astrology, / 1 can believe in a certain type of unity of the elements considered / & use some overt aspects of things whose significance is determined X intensity, / gravity / (e g), / as an implicational representative of interactive effects"). Brunner introduces this story thusly:

"The said program reported, inter alia, how doctors at the Masonic Hospital in Minneapolis had found that the effectiveness of drugs can be enhanced by taking into account the time at which they are administered - or, more precisely, the patient's circadian rhythms, the "biological clock."

"And, just as RK predicted, this phenomenon is especially marked in cancer cases..." (p 159)

In Brunner's intro to With the Night Mail he writes: "I wish I had space to include the imaginary advertisements, news reports, and Letters to the Editor that he devised to accompany the story on its original outing. He must have had a lot of fun inventing his consistent, though imaginary, future world!" (p 66) Yes, such details are sorely missed by yrs truly. "I can't help noting, from the reference to "little Ada Warrleigh," that RK expected the flying aces of the future to include women... I also thoroughly approve of his assumption that was has gone "out of fashion"!" (p 66) YES!! This story was written in 1909 but set in 2000. Too bad about the war prediction not coming true, eh?

Kipling seems to be largely a man after my own heart when he writes things like: "What if that wavering carcass [of a flying vessel] had been filled with the men of the old days, each one of them taught (that is the horror of it!) that after death he would very possibly go forever to unspeakable torment?" "And scarcely a generation ago, we (one knows now that we are only our fathers re-enlarged upon the earth), we, I say, ripped and rammed and pithed to admiration." (p 77) But, no, alas, over 100 yrs later humans are still stuck w/ religion & war.

In the intro what may've been my favorite story, As Easy as A.B.C., & what've been the closest to what people these days might think of as Sci-Fi, Brunner tells us that Kipling was anti-populist. I, too, associate populism w/ mobs & w/ anti-free-thinking - but it's not as simple as that, eh?

"Confronted by a bald statement like "Too much dam' Democracy!", one can be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that the author was in favor of authoritarian rule, even perhaps dictatorship.

"That isn't quite the way of it...

"What RK did very deeply distrust was what we would now call populism: shameless manipulation of the public to provide a veneer of respectability for the seizure and misues of power. he knew about mobs, and the many-headed monsters they become. In India he had seen religious riots between Muslim and Hindu; he had lived in America at a time when lynch law was till common, and regarded it as a betrayal of the ideals his wife's country was supposed to stand for." (p 87)

From this, Brunner concludes that Kipling was what some might today call a "Libertarian". That term, however, has somewhat substantially different meanings in the US, eg, as opposed to Spain. From the story itself:

"Dragomiroff leaned forward to give him a light. "Certainly," said the white-bearded Russian, "the Planet has taken all the precautions against crowds for the past hundred years. What is our total population today? Six hundred million, we hope; five hundred, we think; but - but if next year's census shows more than four hundred and fifty, I myself will eat all the extra little babies. We have cut the birthrate out - right out! For a long time we have said to Almighty God, 'Thank You, Sir, but we do not much like Your game of life, so we will not play.'"

""Anyhow," said Arnott defiantly, "men live a century apiece on the average now."

""Oh, that is quite well! I am rich - you are rich - we are all rich and happy because we are so few and we live so long. Only I think Almighty God He will remember what the Planet was like in the time of Crowds and the Plague." (p 91)

This story's prescience partially centers around its having light & sound used as weapons. This, of course, is becoming more & more standard practice w/ the police state. Brunner's intro to The Eye of Allah contains this: "The next section of the conversation masterfully conveys what it must have been like in the late Middle Ages to live with a sort of imaginary Thought Police inside your head - a predicament many people still suffer from today." (p 138) INDEED! As the Street Ratbags say: "Evict the ruling class from yr mental real estate!" (for more on this listen to the WMBR track (#1) here: http://archive.org/details/Radio1999 )

""I'm no doctor," John returned, "but I'd say Apuleius in all these years might have been betrayed by his copyists. They take short cuts to save 'emselves trouble. Put case that Apuleius wrote the soul seems to leave the body laughing, after this poison. There's not three copyists in five (my judgment) would not leave out the 'seems to.' For who'd question Apuleius? if it seemed so to him, so it must be." (p 151)

Ah, yes, another instance of Kipling's prescience: even in the Middle Ages, there's suspicion of the 'mass' media of cutting corners. All in all, these stories were too '19th century' for me - even tho most of them were written in the 20th. As w/ music & art, it's the rare pre-20th century product that can appeal to my current standards. Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it. Now to Brunner! ( )

I have no idea who John Brunner is or why he's so important as to get his name in the title of this book,* which collects Kipling's science fiction output: nine stories across forty years, running the gamut from the nascency of the genre to its Golden Age. I didn't find them very interesting, unfortunately, with the exception of "With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D." (1909), one of Kipling's two tales of a future where the world is dominated by the Aerial Board of Control-- this one was the most imaginable and accessible. What's a shame, though, is that whenever I read about "With the Night Mail," I see mentioned the fact that on its original publication, it was surrounded by advertisements from the year 2000, simulating the context of the futuristic magazine in which the story ostensibly appeared. As an exercise in worldbuilding it sounds amazing and ahead of its time... so why does no one (to my knowledge) actually reprint all those advertisements with the story? It seems to me that the story arguably has not been reprinted in its entirety if you omit that material.

Though I think Kipling was an excellent short story writer, his tales that can be classified as pure sf do not show off his talents at their best; his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for example, seems to indicate that his tales of the fantastic are better, and I know from personal experience that he's done excellent realist fiction. Fred Lerner argues that Kipling's real impact on contemporary sf comes from his realist tales of India: "Kipling faced the same technical problem that the science fiction writer faces: the need to make an alien time and place understandable to his audience. Whether the scene be India under the British Raj or Mars under the Solar Federation, the reader needs to know the essential differences in biology, technology, and sociology that govern the characters and their actions. This information needs to be provided without interfering with the narrative. The reader wants a story, not a lesson." Essentially, in his depictions of India, Kipling established a model for immersive worldbuilding that sf still follows today.

* Does this make me an uncultured Philistine? Someone please let me know if I should have heard of him.