The Scarlet Plague

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

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This is another one of London's science fiction offerings that has a weird feeling of both alternative history and future history because the important event of the story occurred in our past and London's distant future.

2013 to be precise.

This story is constitutes the reminiscences of a survivor of a horrific plague that incubates over the course of weeks and kills within hours. The plague has killed off 99.999% of humanity, leaving only a handful of survivors regressing into barbarism.

The setting was particularly captivating for me. The protagonist – a former U.C. Berkeley English professor – is recounting the story of the plague to his grandsons on the beach in front of San Francisco's Cliff House where four million people - an unimaginable number for his grandsons - would visit each year. I've been to the Cliff House many times, and I enjoyed the triple vision of imagining London's conception of the Cliff House, my experience of the same site, and the empty, primitive location he describes.

Another fun aspect of the setting was that the plague happened in 2013, during the presidency of Morgan V. London is revisiting the socialism of his The Iron Heel and has imagined the destroyed culture of his future as another oppressive capitalist tyranny ruled by “magnates” with their heel on the throat of the working man. Of course, on occasion, London lapses into a description of the future Aryan race moving out of California to colonize the planet, bringing to mind that the distinction between fascism and socialism was fairly indistinct prior to World War I.

The story is about a novella in length. It has the feel of something written by H.G. Wells in the elegance – prissiness, even – of 19th century English prose. On the whole it was an enjoyable, interesting bit of early science fiction.