A Diversity of Creatures
1917
Kipling's 1917 collection defies easy categorization: a wildly varied anthology that leaps from futuristic satire to Sussex foxhunts to withering portraits of literary poseurs. The centerpiece, "As Easy as ABC," imagines 2065 as a world governed by an Aërial Board of Control, until Northern Illinois secedes from the planetary network, forcing bureaucrats to confront fiercely independent Midwesterners who value privacy over progress. Elsewhere, Kipling chronicles rural English life with affection and sharp eye, while poems and stories alike skewer the pretensions of Bloomsbury-adjacent artists desperate to seem modern. The collection reveals Kipling as something unexpected: a writer equally comfortable satirizing technological utopianism as he is celebrating foxhounds and peasant wisdom. His conservatism here isn't jingoistic but observational, he finds beauty in what endures and suspicion in what claims to improve. The result is a peculiar, often funny, always intelligent book that resists the tidy nationalism of his more famous verses.
