In 1989 appeared two companion paperback tributes by Science Fiction writers to Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936). Edited by Sci Fi authors Sandra Miesel and David Drake, the two books are called: HEADS TO THE STORM and A SEPARATE STAR. They share the same subtitle "A Tribute to Rudyard Kipling."

(1) Each volume contains a number of Sci Fi verses and short stories by mid-20th Century and more recent authors.

(2) Each volume contains an introduction to each of these pieces (almost always by the author) explaining his or her indebtedness to Sci Fi pioneer Rudyard Kipling.

(3) Each volume concludes with stories or verse by Kipling himself.

(4) And in each volume the voice of one science fiction giant, Poul Anderson (1926 - 2001), speaks loudest and lengthiest in praise of Rudyard Kipling and in description of what makes Kipling so powerful and imaginative a writer.

What is the content of A SEPARATE STAR? Eleven essays in praise of Kipling by more recent sci fi writers, eight Kipling-influenced stories or poems by those writers; three stories and a verse by the master himself, Kipling. Every item in the collection is fine and can stand alone to hold your attention.

In this review, however, I will not list the writers but simply try generally to suggest the consensus of editors and writers of what makes Kipling different, what makes Kipling Kipling.

The views of Poul Anderson dominate A SEPARATE STAR. The book's very first piece is  Anderson's "Beyond the Loom of the Last Lone Star..." (a title taken from a line in Kipling's tribute to his best friend Wolcott Balestier who died young). Anderson's essay introduces both HEADS TO THE STORM and A SEPARATE STAR conceived by the editors, I think,  as a unified whole. Anderson draws attention strongly and credibly to "Rudyard Kipling," T.S. Eliot's famous introduction to his own 1943 "A CHOICE OF KIPLING'S VERSE MADE BY T.S. ELIOT." Eliot's points include:

-- (1) Kipling's "verse and his prose are inseparable";

-- (2) Kipling invented a new mixed form of prose and verse, heavily balladic in origin;

-- (3) Unlike most poets, Kipling never aimed at poetry or to be poetic. He aimed to be understood. "...we have to defend Kipling against the charge of excessive lucidity."

As a youngster the first features of Kipling's writing that struck Poul Anderson were its story-telling and its vivid colors. Next Anderson reveled in the glory of Kipling's choice and use of words -- "the sheer writing, the magic of words that are the only right ones -- which nobody else could have discovered." And finally as a successful writer himself Poul Anderson began to grasp "the layer upon layer of meaning behind those words." 

Let me take from two of Kipling's four texts in A SEPARATE STAR passages that I think illustrate two of Anderson's several insights. All examples are from either "With the Night Mail" (1905) or "As Easy As A.B.C." (1912). These two inter-related tales of 21st Century Europe and America foresee a few dozen international transportation technocrats having essentially shoved aside elected governments (with their own lazy consent) in favor of a world characterized by general non-democratic minding your own business, avoiding crowds and abolishing war.


  I. Kipling and Color

A high-powered delegation of a handful of A.B.C. officials, accompanied by a war fleet of 250 A.B.C. warship aircraft, goes to Chicago to nip in the bud first signs of popular agitation to return to the good old days of crowds, demagoguery and voting. To control angry mobs, the fleet is ordered to douse the Chicagoans in a ten minute burst of color and sound, temporarily blinding and deafening them.

"The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully, a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each stiff-egged kick, while the darkness delivered itself -- there is no scale to measure against that utterance -- of the tune to which they kept time. Certain notes -- one learnt to expect them with terror -- cut through one's marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in indescribable agony.

... The two hundred and fifty beams shifted, reformed, straddled and split, narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together ..."

  II. Kipling and the Magic of Words

Were you to pick at random any five phrases or sentences of the four Kipling selections and compare them with any five phrases or sentences randomly chosen from those of his much published, brilliantly creative admirers like Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, Joe Haldeman, Gordon Dickson, Sandra Miesel, Richard McKenna, Robert A. Heinlein etc. -- then Kipling would win hands down.   

Take six words from Kipling's "With The Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D.": "three hundred feet nearer the stars."   

The context is this: a giant dirigible or mail packet is about to fly its regular run from from London to Quebec. Five "cargo containers" (called"coaches") contain large hard at work mail crews. Those coaches are noticed by the story's narrator who is about to observe a mail run over the Atlantic. Inside the containers men are busy sorting mail bags from various countries for delivery to Canada. Toward five different dirigibles above them the five coaches were "shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets three hundred feet nearer the stars."     

I for one have never once in my life coined a phrase as apt as "three hundred feet nearer the stars."  But Kipling seems to scatter words as good through every other paragraph with unconscious grace and ease.

Let me conclude the review with two more examples of word magic from "As Easy As A. B.C., set 60 years farther into the future than "With The Night Mail."

-- Visiting A.B.C. official De Forest says to his colleagues: "Oh, this is absurd! ... We're like an owl trying to work an oat field."

-- The Mayor of Chicago speaking to the visiting A.B.C. bigwigs about a handful of Serviles (rebellious denouncers of the present state of general peace and non-democracy): "You can't teach a Servile not to finger his neighbour's soul!"

Bottom Line: This book deserves re-issuing this year. Sci Fi writers and fans of 2012 who do not believe with Henry Ford that "history is bunk" will learn that the early history of Sci Fi and fantasy fiction is made up of names like Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells ... and above all Rudyard  Kipling!

And if Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Poul Anderson seem to teen age Sci Fi readers like figures from the Middle Ages, those old-young authors, too, tread the boards in A SEPARATE STAR. And their works are ably represented.

-- Read of a tired old soldier with a brilliant inter-galactic career going home to a backward planet and to his primitive clan to take up the kingship he had fled decades earlier as a star-hungry teen.

-- Learn how earth was saved from a power-mad general impregnably based on the moon with dozens of warheads under his control and nothing between him and the conquest of earth. And on and on.

Enter the world of Sci Fi.  

Rudyard Kipling described what that reader's paradise might look like:

 "Beyond the path of the outmost sun through utter darkness hurled --
Further than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled --
Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world."
                        (To Wolcott Balestier)
-OOO-

p.s. Thank you PestySide Patsy for making this reviewable for epinions.

Recommended: Yes