As Easy as A.B.C. - Illustrated!

[ffutures]

Thanks to the awesome book-finding abilities of Brian from Porcupine Books WINOLJ I have just ordered a bound volume of Harmsworth's London Magazine containing the original illustrated version of Kipling's As Easy as A.B.C.. It was serialised in March-April 1912, and is one of the stories that the first Forgotten Futures release was based on. It's coming from Canada so will take a while, but if all goes well I hope to have the illos on line in a month or so, and really high resolution scans on the next Forgotten Futures CD-ROM. Someone recently listed the first of the two issues on ebay at a ridiculously high price, £400, which is what prompted me to start asking about them - Brian found the bound volume (6 issues) in less than a day, and at less than a tenth the price including transatlantic postage!

Incidentally, the ebay listing includes a couple of pictures showing illos - I won't have the cover, they weren't included in the bound volumes, but the rest of it looks very cool:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/itm/281147862146

I'll post again when I have it on line.

Comments

[eledonecirrhosa.livejournal.com]

Are you aware that Forgotten Futures is mentioned in the "science fiction hobby games" book? Blurb about it on UK Roleplayers: http://www.ukroleplayers.com/reviews/a-first-survey-science-fiction-hobby-games/

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, I saw a draft of it. Some interesting stuff there, though I'm not sure I agree with the angle the author has taken on some things.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

That's really cool. "As Easy as A.B.C." is one of my very favorite sf short stories. It really impresses me that Kipling had figured out the narrative technique of having it told by someone who took his future society for granted, and found the time of Kipling's readers weird and barbaric ("all his metaphors were of the most medieval"). I think he may have been one of the first people to write sf that way. I'll be fascinated to see how an artist of Kipling's era envisioned his airship utopia.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The pictures on the ebay ad aren't very clear, but it looks pretty good - I did a version of the one with beams of light for Forgotten Futures 1, though it was crude compared to that, 640x480 black and white: