Aerial Board of Control

"With the Night Mail", the first story about the Aerial Board of Control, is set in 2000 A.D.[a] By this date the Aerial Board of Control was established as an ad hoc working world organisation, much as the global arrangements of the General Post Office already had in Kipling's time, and with the aim of keeping national entanglements to a minimum for commerce and communication.

Kipling envisages the Board as having a tight structure and hierarchical organisation, akin to a blend of the British Merchant Navy and the Post Office, with its world centre in London.

confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders."

[3] Kipling wrote only these two science fiction stories set in his Aerial Board of Control universe of the early 21st century.

The two stories were widely anthologised in the 20th century, for instance opening the major Gollancz anthology One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1969).