The Scarlet Plague

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1910 and was originally published as a series in London Magazine in 1912.

The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after the Red Death, a devastating plague, has wiped out most of humanity. “The handful of survivors from all walks of life have established their own civilization and their own hierarchy in a savage world. Art, science, and all learning has been lost, and the young descendants of the healthy know nothing of the world that was.”

James Howard Smith, a ragged eighty-seven-year-old who had lived in the San Francisco area, was one of only a handful of survivors left alive from the pre-plague era. Now, teary-eyed and clad only in goat-skin, he wanders along deserted railway tracks in a savage wilderness with his grandsons and tries to impart the wonders of that bygone age and the horrors of The Scarlet Plague that wiped out civilization.

“It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past. But the trouble was the astonishing quickness with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human body it entered. No one ever recovered.”

The book was noted in 2020 as having been prescient of the Coronavirus pandemic which is essentially eerie since London wrote this at a time when the world was not as quickly connected by travel as it is today.

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1910 and was originally published as a series in London Magazine in 1912.

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