Hall of Fame finalist review: Rudyard Kipling’s heterotopia “As Easy as A.B.C.” offers critique of lynching, racial prejudice, mob rule

By William H. Stoddard

As an epigraph for his novel Glory Road, Robert Heinlein quoted a passage from Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra, which included the following memorable line:

. . . he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

These lines captured, for me, what I have come to feel is one of the great pleasures of science fiction: stories set in worlds whose customs are different from those of our own time, or as I like to call them, heterotopias—neither “good places” nor “bad places” but “other places,” where customs other than ours are followed and indeed taken for granted.

Such visions implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, invite us to adopt the heterotopian perspective and look back on our own lives and our own world as if we inhabited some nearly unimaginable alien realm. The literary critic Darko Suvin coined the phrase cognitive estrangement for this experience.

One of the first works of fiction that made me feel this effect was one of Rudyard Kipling’s “airship utopia” stories, “As Easy as A.B.C.” – now one of four classic works selected as finalists for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction.

KIPLING’S “AIRSHIP UTOPIA”

At a key point in Kipling’s novelette, its narrator, who has been listening to a political activist of his own time, comments on the unfamiliarity of his ideas:

. . . he demanded that every matter of daily life . . . should be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us, would automatically arise a higher, nobler, and kinder world, based—he demonstrated this with the awful lucidity of the insane—based on the sanctity of the Crowd and the villainy of the single person.

Of course Kipling’s narrator is providing a confused and oversimplified account of democracy. But I think now that that’s what makes the effect so brilliant: This account is coming from someone who hasn’t grown up surrounded by the practices of democratic government, who hasn’t learned their rationales, so inevitably he gets the details wrong, or entirely fails to notice them.

But what kind of society does the narrator live in, and take for granted? What kind of world has the Aerial Board of Control (the “A.B.C.” of the title) as “all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority” (as Kipling says in the companion story “With the Night Mail”)?|

IS DICTATORSHIP THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO DEMOCRACY?

For present-day readers, the natural supposition is that the alternative to democracy is dictatorship (or despotism or tyranny or some other name for authoritarian rule). That model of political polarization was already emerging when Kipling wrote “As Easy as A.B.C.” Should we suppose that the Aerial Board of Control is an authoritarian and repressive power?

What Kipling writes doesn’t seem to support this. Faced with a demand that they take over Chicago, or all of Illinois, which has fallen into civil disorder, one of the Board’s representatives, De Forest, complains, “You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the air like so much horse-power. Can’t you manage yourselves on any terms?” (The reference to snatching horse-power out of the air suggests interesting things about the technology of Kipling’s world.)

The Board seems anything but eager to exercise power. At the report of uprising, they send in an aerial fleet, but it seems not to have lethal weapons; it subdues the crowd below with dazzling lights and sound at the threshold of pain, but afterward another Board member, Pirolo, assures them that they will suffer no lasting effect worse than having sore eyes in the morning.

Perhaps most telling, on the way to Chicago, the Board stop at a farm to ask directions, and the farmer’s daughter immobilizes them with a “ground-circuit” and, when they blow out its fuses, sends a robot cultivator at them—and they make their escape, leaving her unharmed, and later warn her to go into the cellar during their fleet action. Imagine Napoleon, let alone Stalin or Mao, faced with that kind of defiance!

THE “SERVILES” VERSUS THE INDIVIDUAL-RIGHTS LIBERALS

Perhaps a hint of what Kipling is pointing at can be found in the name he gives Chicago’s political dissidents: the Serviles. That name was used in Spain, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for the party that wanted absolute monarchy, as opposed to the Liberals, who wanted constitutional government and individual rights.

What the people of Kipling’s A.D. 2065 think of, when they hear of democracy, is initially crowds and plagues (Chicago’s health officer says “Transportation is Civilisation. Democracy is Disease”) — Kipling’s narrator describes democracy as starting with “crowd-making.” But after that, they associate it with mob violence.

The town square of Chicago holds a world-famous statue of a black man being burned alive, with the words “To the Eternal Memory of the Justice of the People” inscribed on the plinth. The poem that accompanies this story (as poems accompanied nearly all of Kipling’s fiction), “Macdonough’s Song,” warns against “power above or beyond the Laws” and specifically names “Holy People’s Will” as an example of it.

An excerpt from the song’s lyrics:

Whether the State can loose and bind
In Heaven as well as on Earth:
If it be wiser to kill mankind
Before or after the birth–
These are matters of high concern
Where State-kept schoolmen are;
But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
Endeth in Holy War.

Whether The People be led by The Lord,
Or lured by the loudest throat:
If it be quicker to die by the sword
Or cheaper to die by vote–
These are things we have dealt with once,
(And they will not rise from their grave)
For Holy People, however it runs,
Endeth in wholly Slave.

Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!

The central irony of “As Easy as A.B.C.” is that the Serviles, with their advocacy of democracy, have stirred up a revival of mob passions, from which they have to be rescued by the planetary government, one of whose representatives warns them, “you hurry, or your crowd that can’t be wrong will kill you.”

“AND ALL THAT IT IMPLIES…”

Running all through the story is the phrase “and all that it implies.”

It starts out, in the epigraph (taken from “With the Night Mail”), as a legalistic formula defining the authority of the Board. Midway through the story, when De Forest says that “The A.B.C. is responsible for the planetary traffic only,” all four of Chicago’s top officials recite “And all that that implies,” which the narrator describes as a Magna Charta — a demand for the right to be taken over and administered by the A.B.C., however reluctant they may be to do so. (As the Board departs, De Forest says, clearly sarcastically, “You’re under the tyrannous heel of the Board from this moment, but if ever you feel like breaking your fetters you’ve only to let us know.”)

But at the climax of the story, one of the women in the crowd, about to attempt suicide in the hope of provoking a murderous riot, tells De Forest

. . . one feels that an example should be made, because no price is too heavy to pay if—if these people and all that they imply can be put an end to. Do you quite understand or would you be kind enough to tell your men to take the casing off the Statue? It’s worth looking at.

Here “all that they imply” is racial prejudice, mobs, and lynching, all of which have vanished from Kipling’s future world—but haven’t been forgotten.

A DEFT USE OF SCIENCE FICTION TO EXPLORE SOCIAL THEMES

Earlier in the story we learn that the Statue is uncovered once a year, on Thanksgiving Day, followed by the singing of “Macdonough’s Song,” the anthem of a planetary uprising against mass society (“For Holy People, however it runs,/Endeth in wholly slave”) and statism (“Whether the State can loose and bind/In Heaven as well as on Earth”).

The other side of what Kipling is doing here, beyond simple heterotopia, is the use of science fiction to convey a social theme, using a portrayal of a society remote in space or time to ask questions about his own society. And this, too, is one of the classic functions of science fiction, from Jonathan Swift to Robert Heinlein to Stanislaw Lem.

This kind of story lets us suppose that the future may look back with horror not only on the features of our time that we ourselves are troubled by or ashamed of, but by those we are proudest of — such as democracy. The questions about majority rule that Kipling raises in this powerful story are still worth asking.

Note: “As Easy as A.B.C.,” first published in 1912, was selected as a 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist along with Poul Anderson’s 1983 novel Orion Shall Rise, the 1978 Rush song “The Trees” and Charles Stross’s 2003 novel Singularity Sky.

Read capsule descriptions of each finalist in the Hall of Fame press release.

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