Airships over Africa: Short Story by Trevor Hopkins

A young woman, travelling to East Africa for the first time, finds herself suddenly immersed in a murky maelstrom of deceit and intrigue in a world where the British Empire enforces its rule with airships and tussles with other expansionist European powers.

A great many years ago, I first read a story entitled With the Night Mail. When read with modern eyes, this is quite definitely a tale to be classified as SciFi even though it was written in 1905 by Rudyard Kipling (he of Mowgli fame) and set in his Aerial Board of Control universe. Indeed, when I first read it, this story was the first item in a collection entitled "100 Years of Science Fiction".

The then-future world postulated by Kipling was one where almost all trade and commerce was ruled by vast airships, flying thousands of feet in the air and guided by upwards-pointing lights known as "cloudbreakers", like lighthouses of the sky.

So this tale is based in a similar universe, where much of the commerce of the British Empire in late Victorian times is conducted by airship, rather than steamers.

This story has a feel of only the first episode in a much larger picture; perhaps even a whole novel.

I have started work on an immediate sequel called African Designs. Other works in the same sequence are Observatory Mount, The Steam Road, Clockwork Cabaret, Camera Obscura and Imperial Lifeblood.

These stories are all set in what is probably the same universe as The Cassandra Effect.

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