Our monthly audio adventures were temporarily derailed by a certain litigious cockwomble, but we're righting the ship as we chug toward The Mark Steyn Club's second birthday. So welcome to the twenty-third yarn in these Tales for Our Time. We're going to be spending the next few days with a brace of stories featuring the Aerial Board of Control. What's that? Well..:
The Mark Boat hums off joyously and hangs herself up in her appointed eyrie. Here she will stay, a shutterless observatory; a life-boat station; a salvage tug; a court of ultimate appeal-cum-meteorological bureau for three hundred miles in all directions, till Wednesday next when her relief slides across the stars to take her buffeted place. Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible only to the Aërial Board of Control—the A. B. C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes, controls this planet. "Transportation is Civilization," our motto runs. Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically, the A. B. C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of private administration on its shoulders.
Yes, we're about to visit the twenty-first century as imagined by Rudyard Kipling in a rare venture into science-fiction. The Aerial Board of Control was part of the background detail for a short story he wrote in 1905, a journalist account of a transatlantic overnight mail service by airship in the year 2000. This first tale is mostly about the mechanics of the thing - a world in which the skies have supplanted the shipping lanes as the principal method of transportation of goods and people and correspondence. A few years later Kipling returned to the ABC to speculate on the broader sociocultural implications of such a society. So this technically minded yarn is by way of prologue to a more profound consideration of where the technology leads.
To hear me read Part One of Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD", prefaced by my own introduction to the story, please click here and log-in.
As I've emphasized since we launched The Mark Steyn Club almost two years ago, our regular content - all my daily commentary, cultural and geopolitical essays, our weekend movie and music features, SteynPosts and Mark's Mailbox and all the rest - will always be free to everyone around the planet. In fact, every week we now offer more free content than at any point in our sixteen-year history. But we have spent the last couple of years letting Club members in on a few experimental features which we might eventually make more widely available. Tales for Our Time is one such experiment: If you're not a Club member (or you are but you've never partaken of this series) you can hear what you're missing in our first-birthday Tales for Our Times sampler, a 75-minute audio special hosted by me and including excerpts from some of our ripping yarns of the last year - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, John Buchan, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson. And, if it whets your appetite, you can find the above authors and a dozen more collected here.
I'm truly thrilled to see that our nightly radio serials have proved one of the most popular of our Club extras these last two years. I did do a little professional story-reading a zillion years ago, so, if these fancies tickle you, we may release them as audio books on CD or Audible a ways down the road. But for the moment it's an exclusive bonus for members. If you've enjoyed our monthly Steyn Club radio adventures and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly (the latest airs this Tuesday);
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, SteynPosts, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Priority booking for the second annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise (following last year's sell-out inaugural cruise);
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, including my next tour with Dennis Miller;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to With the Night Mail but to all the other audio adventures listed below.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, whether you like my reading of this twenty-third Tale for Our Time or are minded to return to sender, then feel free to comment away below. And do join us tomorrow for Part Two of With the Night Mail.
For previous Tales for Our Time, click below:
#1: The Tragedy of the Korosko
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#2: The Time Machine
by H G Wells
#3: The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
#4: The Prisoner of Zenda
by Anthony Hope
#5: The Cat That Walked By Himself
by Rudyard Kipling
#6: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#7: The Rubber Check
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#8: A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
#9: Plum Duff
by Mark Steyn
#10: To Build a Fire
by Jack London
#11: The Overcoat
by Nikolai Gogol
#12: The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
#13: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
#14: The Man Who Would Be King
by Rudyard Kipling
#15: His Last Bow
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#16: Greenmantle
by John Buchan
#17: Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
#18: The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
#19: Little Women at Christmas
by Louisa May Alcott
#20: The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#21: The Gift of the Magi
by O Henry
#22: Anne of Green Gables: An Unfortunate Lily Maid
by L M Montgomery