Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) wrote this work of science fiction in 1904, a year after the Wright brothers' flight. He had been interested in aviation since 1887, when he published an essay on a successful flight by a French balloonist three years earlier. He predicted that the mere threat of air power would bring combatants to the peace table and end war forever.

Thomas Pinney, an authority on Kipling and a professor at Pomona College, wrote in the introduction, "The poet of the automobile who never drove one, the singer of the airplane who never left the ground, is one with the author of The Jungle Book, who never saw an Indian jungle, and who wrote the book in a Vermont winter, with four feet of snow outside. What better evidence could one have that the imagination does not need direct experience in order to function, but may work all the more powerfully without it?"

Like the first edition, which puffed up the book by printing text only on recto pages, with versos blank, the Arion edition fleshes out the book with thirty-two pages of illustrations by the artist Vincent Perez, who reinvents dirigibles, rubberized flight suits, engines, propellers, gondolas, and docking stations.