The Scarlet Plague
1912
Sixty years ago, the Scarlet Death swept across the world, wiping out billions and thrusting humanity back into savagery. Now an old man named Granser shuffles through the ruins of California with his three feral grandsons, the last person alive who remembers trains, universities, and cities. The boys hunt with crude bows; they barely understand speech. Granser tries to tell them about the world that was, but words like "university" and "insurance" and "telephone" tumble into empty air. They cannot imagine a time when humans flew or healed each other with medicine. They are interested mainly in food and when Granser will die so they can inherit his wife. This is Jack London's chilling vision of the apocalypse: not fire or war, but a plague so violent it Red Death reduced humanity to stone-age survivors within a single generation. The horror is not the dying, it is the forgetting. Granser's memories are the only record of everything humanity ever accomplished, and his audience is too savage to care. A haunting, elegiac meditation on what we lose when we lose ourselves.
Editions
X-Ray
“The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.””
— Jack London
“It was what should have been a bright summer day, but the smokefrom the burning world filled the sky, through which the sun shonemurkily, a dull and lifeless orb, blood-red and ominous.””
— Jack London
“من أفواه حفنة من الأطفال خرجت حكمة كل الأزمنة؛ البعض سوف يقاتل .. والبعض سوف يحكم .. والبعض سوف يصلى .. أما الباقون فسوف يتجرعون الكدح والمعاناة، وينزفون فوق جثثهم، مرة تلو مرة بلا نهاية .. يا جمال الدولة المتحضرة المدهش !””
— Jack London
“And after all, what did it matter? Everybody died anyway, the good and the bad, the efficients and the weaklings, those that loved to live and those that scorned to live. They passed. Everything passed.””
— Jack London
“El universo ha sido aniquilado, conmocionado hasta su destrucción; pero el hombre sigue siendo el mismo...””
— Jack London
“Such words he spoke, but they are not his words. He was a vulgar, low-minded man, and vile oaths fell continually from his lips.””
— Jack London
“All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.””
— Jack London
“He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live?”
— Jack London
“The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it”
— Jack London
