Meme-Free Zone

A couple of years ago I put illustrated versions of Kipling's With The Night Mail and As Easy as A.B.C. on line, with some notes on their publication and variations.

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff1/nm-abc.pdf

As Easy as A.B.C. was serialized over two issues of The London Magazine. At the time I said

The cover of the March [1912] issue was related to this story; unfortunately it was not included in the bound volume from which this was scanned. The illustration on the next page was originally a small photograph of a very battered copy of the magazine; I’ve corrected perspective etc. but couldn’t do much about its size. I don’t know if the April issue’s cover was relevant; any information would be welcome.

I've just found an image of the April issue's cover and it has nothing to do with Kipling, it's a bit of mawkish patriotism, a generic British soldier hugging the flag, so apologies to anyone who has actually tried to research this for me!



Later: Of course there is a sort of connection. Kipling wrote The Flag of Their Country (May 1899), one of the Stalky & Co. stories, which is basically an attack on unthinking flag-waving patriotism.

I've made a few small changes, fixed a last couple of typos (I hope), and added page numbers and bookmarks.

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff1/nm-abc.pdf

About 4.29mb now.

If nobody has found any problems I'm going to put links on my web site etc.

later and as if by magic I've just found the November 1905 McClure's magazine on line, and need to make some changes to the PDF and my web site to reflect that. All minor though - a little more information on the different versions of the story, and illustrations, unfortunately not incredibly well scanned; a coloured version of the girl on the overhead ramp thing, and a different illustration of the rescue, which I had already but in a very poor scan. I'll probably put them on line but won't add them to the PDF, I think. Revisions should be on line in an hour or two.

6 pm - Revised PDF is now on line - file size is reduced to 4.15mb (forgot to do it earlier).

7 pm - Revised art page and With The Night Mail are on line.

The Aerial Board of Control's official logo, as found in the chapbook for With The Night Mail

Not sure it quite works - I read it as CAB, and the lettering style is a bit fussy, but it's the nearest we're going to get to an official logo.



Unfortunately I didn't have this when I was writing Forgotten Futures 1, and I gave the ABC a completely different logo, as here:



or just big blocky A.B.C. letters.

As well as looking at Kipling's As Easy as A.B.C., nojay also went through With the Night Mail and found a few errors. That was probably my first OCR project and it's been revised numerous times over the years, but mostly that's been adding illustrations. While fixing the problems he found, I took the opportunity to tidy the HTML a little so that it is now somewhat less kludgy than it was and looks a little better on screen. Still not perfect, but it's gradually getting better. Feedback on any remaining problems would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff1/night.htm

I'm very glad to say that the volume of The London Magazine containing As Easy as A.B.C. was finally delivered twenty minutes ago - no explanation of why it took so long, and it doesn't appear to have been damaged, opened by customs, lost, or anything like that, so I can only assume that it simply ended up on a ship that took a long time to reach its destination. Hopefully I'll get the illustrations scanned and a revised version of the story on line tonight or tomorrow - I also want to compare the text to see if anything was added or removed, at a first glance I think not.

I'm enormously relieved, and very pleased - I think that this is fairly important for anyone interested in early SF art.

To the British Library again, where I had a look at Robert William Cole's other books, which are even more obscure than The Struggle For Empire. I was hoping that one or more would be another scientific romance, but no such luck. Quick synopses (bearing in mind that I skimmed them fairly quickly):

His Other Self: The Story of a Man with a Past - 1906
A former wastrel who has found love and turned over a new leaf is intermittently possessed by his rakish past self, who does all the things that the hero no longer wants to do - boozing, chasing loose women, etc. - to teach the hero some sort of moral lesson. Eventually the hero is prepared to renounce his fiancée to ensure that her life will be happy, even if he is miserable. This apparently proves that he is worthy, and the haunting ends.

The Death Trap - 1907
Germany, France, and Russia go to war with Britain (the French under duress, the others willingly), destroy the British fleet, and invade southern England. Britain is nearly defeated, and comes close to revolution due to dastardly German agents and government bungling, but a heroic general leads Britain to victory, aided by the Japanese navy (the Japanese apparently remember Britain as allies from their war with Japan) who take out the German fleet at the eleventh hour - the French quietly switching sides just before the battle. I suppose it is technically a future war story, but there are none of the tropes of scientific romance; the technology is what was available at the time.

The Artificial Girl - 1908
Very disappointing - it sounds like it's about androids, actually it's about transvestitism! The hero (for want of a better word) disguises himself as his sister so that he can attend her finishing school and pursue the girl he loves. Amazingly, this ends without him being arrested, sued, or kicked in the goolies, and with the girl he has pursued possibly falling in love with him. I suspect that they hadn't quite developed the concept of stalking in 1908...

I also checked on the magazine publication of Kipling's As Easy As A.B.C. and confirmed that there was a version in The London Magazine, March 1912, though I wasn't able to confirm if it was illustrated. But given that the date's right, I shall try to get hold of a copy if I can.

Total walked today about 6.7 miles; I walked there, had a salad in the cafe at the library, and walked back by a less direct route. Feeling rather pleased.

Four pictures - three of them new to me. I've previously seen the first of the pictures following as a colour version in the chapbook. Four fairly large gifs behind the cut. The only other illustration in the magazine is the one of several people being rescued from a wrecked dirigible, which I previously had - unfortunately time has not been kind and the quality is very poor, almost as bad as the earlier scan, and I want to work on it some more before posting it. For some reason it's the first picture of the story in the magazine.

( With the Night Mail - Windsor Magazine illustrations )