The Scarlet Plague

A novella set in 2073 telling the story of the few survivors (and their descendants) of a pandemic that took place in 2013.

Sound like the work of Cormac McCarthy? Perhaps Ray Bradbury? Maybe Margaret Atwood?

I was surprised to find out instead that a novella with this premise was written by Jack London and published in 1915… a good thirty years before Albert Camus’ The Plague would see publication.

Coming in at under 20,000 words, London’s The Scarlet Plague can be read in a few hours. The actual plot is fairly simple, too. An old man (a rare survivor of “the Scarlet Death” and a former English Professor) recounts to his half-attentive grandsons the onset of the plague and the early years of his survival up until he found other survivors. He speaks too of the world lost to the plague.

The world of 2073 is sparsely populated, and nature thrives without the prevalence of people.

Is the book a dystopia? A utopia? Something in between?

London seems to suggest that as long as there are people, there will be no utopia. Our very nature seems to thrust us toward dystopia.

It’s part of what makes this novella kind of fascinating. Why exactly did London write the book? What’s his point?

It would be a great book to teach and discuss.

In terms of plot, very little happens in the present of the story. The bulk of the book is the old man, Professor James Howard Smith, talking about the past. His nearly-feral grandsons listen while they also tend to their goats, cook mussels and crabs, and scheme dreamily for more power within the structure of their tribe.

Power. Progress. It's what London suggests got humankind to the point that a mass killing via plague was even possible.

One can’t help but wonder if what London is implying is that the world is much better off without humankind. Even as they eat crab, Smith says to the boys, “But there weren’t many crabs in those days. They were fished out, and they were great delicacies […] And now crabs are accessible the whole year around.”

Smith is an interesting character, too. He seems to lament the world that the plague took away, but his lamentation is akin to a Gone with the Wind kind of feeling… as though he laments a corrupt world that really never should have been.

He speaks of a woman, Vesta Van Warden, “the perfect flower of generations of the highest culture this planet has ever produced.” She’s rich, married to the President of the Board of Industrial Magnates. Her world is a world of servants and, even Smith admits that in the pre-plague years, Vesta wouldn’t have lowered herself to speak to him.

Smith talks about how Vesta survived the plague only to be enslaved by her chauffeur in the post-plague years. Smith weeps for her, but seems to miss the irony in the fact that in the pre-plague years, her chauffeur was essentially her slave and treated no better.

I was told that in his novel, Martin Eden, London makes his titular character anti-socialist. He wanted readers to see Martin as flawed for his anti-socialist beliefs, but readers largely missed it, leaving London to lament to Upton Sinclair, “I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it."

I wonder if London intended also that Smith be a flawed narrator, mourning a lost world that in hindsight hardly merited mourning.

I often think about that… about our 2021 world… and wonder, “What if we are doing this all wrong? What if we have been, almost from the jump?”

I think we are, but I digress.

The contradictions in Smith’s lament are the beauty of the book. It really would make for excellent discussion in a book club or classroom.

Even as Smith goes on and on about the lost world, his grandson Hare-Lip makes the astute comment, “What a gabble the old geezer makes.” It's all so much words, and the boys can hardly believe that their grandfather's "profession" used to consist of standing in front of a room making words about other people's words. Smith even realizes that his highly specialized skills in literature have left him nearly useless now that the world has pushed humankind to exist much lower on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

And Smith, too, has moments where he doesn’t so much lament the lost world of his youth as he does the lost nature of humanity.

Looking at his grandsons, whom he considers “savages”, he says, “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. When we increase and feel the lack of room, we will proceed to kill one another.”

That statement alone holds out little hope for humankind. Interestingly, considering that Jack London is celebrated as a pioneer in what would become science fiction, his sentiments are echoed in the sci-fi classic Terminator 2: Judgment Day when Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a reprogrammed terminator, explains to a young John Connor about humankind, “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.”

How I leapt from The Scarlet Plague to Terminator 2, I’m not certain. But I’m letting it stand. 

The delete key will see no action this day. As Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises, “No bulls would die today” or, in this case, “no bullshit would die today.”

I quit drinking ten weeks ago, so I don’t know where this is coming from.

In short, The Scarlet Plague is a fascinating and quick read. I would highly recommend reading it closely before or after reading London’s The Iron Heel, which I discuss: here.

Jeff "Van" Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. In 2022, Montag Press will publish his dystopian novel, Falling Sky. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.