This month's free ebook from
EbookClassics.org.uk is Kipling's
Traffics and Discoveries.
From their blog:
Quote:
The stories in Rudyard Kipling’s collection Traffics and Discoveries are stuffed with new technology.
New in 1900, at any rate: early motor cars (one steam driven); experiments with wireless within months of the Marconi patent; new weapons and methods of warfare; early electrification projects; primitive moving pictures at a time when Hollywood was still best known for citrus fruit. Nowadays he would be first in line for the latest iPad.
Kipling’s interest went beyond technology. He loved talking to experts, and in one way this book is a series of imagined conversations, full of arcane knowledge and jargon…. His characters build rapid-firing field guns rather than apps, but their obsessive nerdiness is instantly recognisable.
He was also interested in the weird and unusual – this collection includes three and a half supernatural yarns (the half is Mrs Bathurst, which baffled and intrigued readers like P.G. Wodehouse for years) – and in elaborate schoolboy practical jokes, which are still entertaining, if not quite as side-splittingly funny as he found them.
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