A Separate Star

I am looking at the title page of A SEPARATE STAR: A SCIENCE FICTION TRIBUTE TO RUDYARD KIPLING. Put together in 1989 by science fiction authors and editors David Drake and Sandra Miesel, this paperback is the companion volume to HEADS TO THE STORM: A TRIBUTE TO RUDYARD KIPLING: same editors, publisher (Baen) and same year of publication. *** Both books are similarly arranged: in this case, eleven essays offering tributes by 20th century Sci Fi writers to earlier Sci Fi pioneer Rudyard Kipling; eight Kipling-influenced stories by those later writers; three stories and a verse by the master himself: Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936). *** In the "Tributes" portion we learn how later, more familiar to us as Sci Fi writers were read Kipling yarns practically in their cradles by grandmother, mother or father. We hear an ageing L. Sprague de Camp say in 1987, "Now, as a very senior citizen, I am interested in Kipling as a celebrant of one of history's most consequential movements: European conquest of the world." *** Nestled among the short stories of the other later science fiction authors we encounter L. Sprague de Camp's poem "Ghost Ships." In a harbor in the sky sailing vessels from galleys through galleons to air craft carriers to atomic submarines lament how each successive improvement in warfare has sunk from earlier glorious standards of sea power (e.g., face-to-face combat or opening up China or Japan). The poem ends with an ancient Phoenician craft predicting that should the next war be atomic: "If any live, they'll fight from bark canoes in broils marine;/ So take your sentimental leave of human naval war!" *** Like HEADS TO THE STORM, its companion volume, A SEPARATE STAR concludes with pieces from Rudyard Kipling. The product of a very young man traveling from India all about North America en route to fame in London, "An Interview with Mark Twain," has nothing obvious to do with science fiction but is a great read for all that. The two intertwined companion stories "With The Night Mail" and "As Easy As ABC" are about the 21st century conquest of war, overpopulation and individualism along with characteristic Kipling descriptions of how machines work. The political verse "MacDonough's Song" mulls over State power and asks "If it be wiser to kill mankind/ Before or after the birth." A future world will look back with satisfaction to Leviathan's annihilation of rule by "The People." ***What strikes me is that were you to pick at random any five phrases or sentences of the four selections of Kipling and compare them with any five phrases sentences randomly chosen from those of his much published, brilliantly creative admirers like Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, Joe Haldeman, Gordon Dickson, Sandra Miesel, Richard McKenna, Robert A. Heinlein or others -- then Kipling would win hands down. *** Take six ordinary words from Kipling's "With The Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.": "three hundred feet nearer the stars." *** The context is this: a giant dirigible or mail packet is about to fly its regular run from from London to Quebec. Five what we would call "containers" (but men of 2000 A.D. call "coaches") contain large work crews. Those coaches are noticed by the story's narrator who is about to be an honored passenger on one such voyage over the Atlantic. Inside the containers men are busy sorting mail bags from various countries for delivery to Canada. Toward five different dirigibles above them the five coaches were "shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets three hundred feet nearer the stars." *** I for one have never coined a phrase as apt as "three hundred feet nearer the stars." Nor can I recall reading anything as good in the essays, poem or stories offered in this superb book by David Drake or Poul Anderson & Company. But Kipling seems to scatter them through every other paragraph with unconscious grace and ease.-OOO-