Actions and Reactions
by Rudyard Kipling
Imagine an alternate reality where the man who gave the world the Junglebook, Gung Dean and 'The Ghost of the Rickshaw' is a science fiction writer – generations before Hugo Gernsback and The Amazing; to the pulp SF, which reigned in the thirties; intellectually pressive in the forties and sophisticated literary magazines of SF such as the Galaxy and the Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine of the fifties. Think about it: A world where Rudyard Kipling was a science fiction writer, long before SF was invented, as we understand it. Actually, it was. And the book in your hand – Actions and Reactions – is a great example of this. It looks a lot like a kind of sophisticated SF — literary without being valuable — we all remember it from the Golden Age of the Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. Imagine that. We live in an alternate universe.
