WITH THE NIGHT MAIL and "Easy as A.B.C."

Narrating two short stories, Gildart Jackson deftly delivers the author’s vision of a possible future. In 1905, Kipling imagined a society in the distant twenty-first century largely under the command of an air-traffic superpower called the Aerial Board of Control. A cadre of citizens who desperately crave privacy and democracy cuts off communication with the ABC to protest. Jackson speaks smoothly with a voice that’s crisp and clear. While the primarily English male voices in the first story aren’t particularly distinguishable, each suggests a unique personality. Jackson demonstrates his real talent in the sequel, in which he switches effortlessly between a range of accents and pitches—English to American to Russian to Japanese to Italian, male to female—instantaneously from one to the next, soundly reproducing Kipling’s dark world. A.K.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2014]