Actions and Reactions Book

I've wanted to read this for quite a while because of With The Night Mail which I read about while researching What Your Children are Doing on the Information Highway back in the early nineties. All I knew about the short story was:


In the time of the Wright brothers, Rudyard Kipling wrote With the Night Mail, a story about a world in which air flight turned the Atlantic into little more than a pond. He envisioned a world in which the oceans were no longer a barrier to fast and easy travel. In other words, he envisioned that future as it became. But he also envisioned an all-encompassing 'Aerial Board of Control' which usurped powers from local governments, partially because of the importance of air travel to commerce, but also because air travel had so shrunk the world that major governments became minor powers.


And that is basically true, although governments had shrunk so much that this aspect of the world didn't even figure into the story, but only into a minor snippet in the supporting material. It's a very nuts-and-bolts story, done up as an industry newsletter for flyers. This makes it even stranger than your average so-called hard-science story from the early days of science fiction'which this predated, having been published in 1909.

From the 18-second mile to the height that air travel occurs at, Kipling got almost all of the technical details wrong, both in flight and in government, but he understood the nature of man and progress:


So far, we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes. But some day'even on the Equator'we shall hold the Sun level in his full stride.


He knew to never bet against technological progress. We'll always go faster and higher tomorrow.

The stories in this collection are all very different from each other; With the Night Mail is the only science fiction; then there's a fantasy story about a haunted house almost done as a detective story, and in the less-haunted genre, a couple moves into a old manor-house and discovers that the ties of land and blood are stronger than the travels of man. Both An Habitation Enforced and Garm'A Hostage make it clear that if you never fail in your duty you'll have no trouble.

And that you can't get out of your responsibility to the future, which is contained in your past.

One of the better and most amazing stories is The Mother Hive, also about responsibility, and echoing many of the sentiments Kipling put into The Gods of the Copybook Headings. He describes life in a beehive that shows what they mean in a tale that is eerily familiar to the news we read every day.


Some of the sound bees warned them that ill-gotten gains never prosper, but the Oddities at once surrounded them and balled them to death. That was a punishment they were almost as fond of as they were of eating, and they expected the sound bees to feed them.


"Tell us all about your feelings," says the Wax-moth to the bees, to convince them not to listen to their economists. The wax-moth and its buzzing acolytes ridicule those who complain that if no one gathers honey, the stores of honey in the hive will run out. You don't understand the "economic simplicity", they say. So that ultimately,


…the sound bees never mentioned these matters. They knew, if they did, the Oddities would hold a meeting and ball them to death.


Nowadays they'd twitter them out of a job.