‘With The Night Mail’ by Rudyard Kipling

I was a bit sceptical about the inclusion of this story but it is indeed a proper hard SF story, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect in an anthology of the evolution of the subgenre. So hooray for that. Unfortunately ‘With The Night Mail’ takes the familiar, old-fashioned form of a guided tour of the world of tomorrow and is entirely without plot. After the “story” there are a further 16 pages of extraneous guff that flesh out the world but are beyond even sarcastic quote marks.

Hardness: *****
Quality: **