The Poison Belt

Though he's best known for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Conan Doyle also wrote a series of short stories about eccentric scientist Professor Challenger. In this work, originally published in 1913, the professor invites his friends to bring oxygen tanks with them to his London home. There, they gather at the window to watch the end of the world as a layer of poison gas kills all living beings in its path. Most of the action in this slow-moving story, read by Gildart Jackson, is told through the philosophical and theoretical conversations among Challenger and his terrified friends as they contemplate the meaning of what they've witnessed.Kipling's two stories concern the Aerial Board of Control, or A.B.C., an air traffic control organization that develops into an unofficial, despotic world government. In the Night Mail was first published by McClure's Magazine in 1905. An unnamed reporter in the year 2000 is a passenger on an airship bound for Quebec from London. Much of the story is comprised of long, heavily detailed descriptions of the airship's design and the imaginary scientific principles that make it work. As Easy as A.B.C., published first by London Magazine in 1912, rejoins the despotic reign of the A.B.C. in the year 2065 as it dispatches zeppelins to subdue an insurrection. This story reads like an operations manual for the airships, and the human characters have very little personality.