story had envisioned complex air-traffic control by radio as... "a world-wide network of radio services, supplying weather forecasts, and allotting safety-levels, and landing priorities, thirty years before anyone else had dreamed of 'flying control'". In terms of influence on other writers of the pre-war era the initial story pre-dates H.G. Wells' The War in the Air by three years, and presents a far more optimistic vision of the future. More generally the concept that air traffic would become widely used, and that some rational and impartial supra-national control of it would needed, is one that became a staple of pulp and 'scientifiction' as flight took wing in the 1930s. The two stories were widely anthologised in the 20th century, for instance opening the major Gollancz anthology One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1969), and are now in the public domain. The innovative approach of the "Night Mail" story, termed "indirect exposition", strongly influenced the style of the later post-war science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein. The corrected typescript of "With the Night Mail" was acquired at auction by the University of Sussex library in 1997. The tales inspired a substantial role-playing game, Forgotten Futures, which had as its first source book The A.B.C. Files: A Role Playing Sourcebook For Kipling's Scientific Romance (1998). This is currently free and has a technical glossary and timeline drawn from the stories. References , page 355. Texts With The Night Mail As Easy as ABC Illustrated PDF of both stories Fictional elements introduced in 1905 Fictional military organizations Fictional governments Works by Rudyard Kipling Bureaucracy in fiction Air traffic control organizations