which, in turn, we get stories like 'The Ship that Found Herself' and '.007'. To Kipling..., the machine is a major expression of man's ability to understand and control the forces of nature. Some contemporary reviewers felt he went too far in this story. In a long essay in MacMillan's magazine, "an admirer"—who, judging from his comment on bicycles and horses, does not feel the same way about machines as Kipling—complained, Here all Mr. Kipling's mania break loose all at once—there is the madness of American slang, the madness of technical jargon, and the madness of believing that silly talk, mostly consisting of moral truisms, is amusing because you put it into the mouths of machines.... It is no doubt true that machines have their idiosyncrasies, their personalities even; a bicycle can be nearly as annoying as a horse. For once in a way it may be good fun to push the fancy a little farther and attribute to them sentient life, but Mr. Kipling has overdone the thing. The 007 connection The story is sometimes mentioned speculatively as one of many possible inspirations for 007, the code number of Ian Fleming's fictional detective James Bond, but no connection is known. Footnotes See also The Little Engine That Could External links Includes ".007." .007 Google Books page images of full text from an 1899 edition. 1897 short stories Short stories by Rudyard Kipling Works originally published in Scribner's Magazine Fictional locomotives Trains in fiction