Rudyard Kipling 1 hr 6 min read

Aboard a great transatlantic mail-dirigible in the year 2000, a reporter rides the storm-lashed Atlantic air-lanes, into a future of aerial commerce ruled by the Aerial Board of Control.

Rudyard Kipling's 1905 story is a landmark of visionary hard science fiction. Vivid, prophetic, superbly imagined. Read it for a dazzling feat of world-building from a master, a fully realized future of airship travel, complete with invented technology, jargon, and mock-documentary trimmings, one of the most influential early works of hard SF and a founding text of the future-history mode.

In its time

Published in 1905, during the 1900s, the scientific romance.

Reading it

1 hr 6 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Frank X. Leyendecker