Kipling's famous "With The Night Mail" - newly and fully annotated

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, by a leading scholar of the fantastic. 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 British publication 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 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, 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.