But the 162 instead holds course and steers right into a heavy storm, described by Kipling as "We were dragged hither and yon by warm or frozen suctions, belched up on the tops of wulli-was, spun down by vortices and clubbed aside by laterals under a dizzying rush of stars in the company of a drunken moon."

In 1909 it was issued as a popular book by Doubleday, Page & Company,[1] slightly revised and with additional poetry and faux advertisements and notices from the future.

From the low-arched expansion-tanks on either side the valves descend pillarwise to the turbine-chests, and thence the obedient gas whirls through the spirals of blades with a force that would whip the teeth out of a power-saw.

Behind, is its own pressure held in leash or spurred on by the lift-shunts; before it, the vacuum where Fleury's Ray dances in violet-green bands and whirled turbillions of flame.

The jointed U-tubes of the vacuum-chamber are pressure-tempered colloid (no glass would endure the strain for an instant) and a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches the Ray intently.

stories have also been held up as the first examples of the use in science fiction of force-fields, streamed data-recording to tape, and the immense pulsing 'cloud-breaker' navigation beams that guide the world's airships can be seen as anticipating the laser.

More generally the concept that air traffic would become widely used, and that some rational and impartial supra-national control of it was needed, is one that became a staple of pulp and 'scientifiction' as flight took wing in the 1930s.

The innovative approach of the "Night Mail" story, termed "indirect exposition" (or "incluing"), strongly influenced the style of the later post-war science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein.