The Scarlet Plague (1912)

can't decide if it wants to be socialist or deeply reactionary. would like to have had London do a working-men's version. standard account of reversion to base,which, in this case, means 'prehistoric' inferior to Purple Cloud in its account of the final horror of civilization's end

hilarious to me that narrator a Berkeley English prof, from family of same, and somehow paid handsomely in 2012 under industrial oligarchy. oh, science fiction!! ( )

1.5 stars?

Okay... well. This one didn't do very much for me. I had expected something different, and what this was was boring.

Here's your story: An old man, who is all that is left of a bygone civilization, tries to tell 4 young boy-savages about it. The boys and the old man don't understand each other because they are from two different worlds. The old man tells the story of what the Scarlet Plague and its aftermath was like.

I just couldn't really drum up any interest in this one. Yeah, that's about it. Disappointing.

At least it was short. ( )

This short novel (or novella), originally published 100 years ago, is set in San Francisco 60 years after the Scarlet Death came in 2013. It opens with a very old man and his grandson, a young boy, walking along an old monorail track, now an animal trail, near the sand dunes and Cliff House on the beach. I suspect I may have read this when I was a young teen, because there was a vague familiarity to the story and illustrations.

The old man tells his grandchildren the story of how the Scarlet Death came and how rapidly civilization collapsed. The story was interesting, although quite dated in some ways. There was an extra appeal to me as the story covers many places and towns in the Bay Area where I was born and live. As London depicts the days before and during the plague it sounds like 1912 rather than 2012, although in other ways his observations of the world and it's problems are rather timeless. This is not a book to get excited about, but holds a place as one of the earliest pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction. ( )

A gripping and quite horrifying little story about a post-apocalyptic world in 2073 where almost the entire population has been wiped out by the eponymous plague. The narrator is an old man, the only survivor of the world before, recounting to a group of cynical and disbelieving boys the disaster that happened 60 years earlier. The only slight jarring issue, as with all such "future historicals" and obviously unavoidable, is that the world of the plague year is like 1913, roughly when it was written, rather than 2013 when it is supposed to be set. The characters in that world are rather cliched beautiful women and heroic or beastly cruel men.

This e-edition came up with a mini-biography of the author's interesting life (worth reading) and material for students in the form of a plot summary and character analyses - to be avoided if the story is new for you. ( )

A remarkably prescient tale for our times told briskly by one of the great masters of the short story. ( )