Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
Novela postapocalíptica maravillosa.
Es increíble que haga más de 100 años de su escritura porque parece muy actual.
Me ha encantado.
Es increíble que haga más de 100 años de su escritura porque parece muy actual.
Me ha encantado.
The Scarlet Plague by Jack London
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RQ6MQGJCU3T9F?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
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.
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RQ6MQGJCU3T9F?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
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.
If you keep in mind when this was written, it is actually quite good, though in truth little more than a short story in length.
London manages to pretty convincingly write about a future person remembering a past that is still far in the future for the author. Though he was off on a few details (zeppelins never really did hit it big), it's not hard for a person who lived through 2013 to visualize the story taking place in the reality of the time period, rather than an imaged 1900-era future, and that's a credit both to his vision and writing ability.
Unfortunately, some uncomfortable, antiquated, and sometimes just odd views of class and gender slip through, firmly placing the book in its turn-of-the-20th-century context and making it a blend of pleasure read and anthropological study. Still, it's a fascinating and tight narrative of an apocalyptic plague written before the tropes of the genre were fully established.
Unfortunately, some uncomfortable, antiquated, and sometimes just odd views of class and gender slip through, firmly placing the book in its turn-of-the-20th-century context and making it a blend of pleasure read and anthropological study. Still, it's a fascinating and tight narrative of an apocalyptic plague written before the tropes of the genre were fully established.
The rise of Covid-19 apparently led to an increase in appetite in post-apocalyptic fiction. It is not at all clear why some readers seek comfort or pleasure in reading about fictional catastrophes in the middle of a very real one. In my case, I think that what led me to seek some post-apocalyptic fiction was an attempt to build a fictional barrier between me as a reader and what the world is going through right now. Rather contradictorily, I felt that the ability of contemplating absolutely “worst-case scenarios” through fiction made me better prepared to face the daily barrage of pandemic news.
And so it was that I came across Jack London’s early post-apocalyptic novella The Scarlet Plague. Originally published in 1912, this work is set in 2073, sixty years after a deadly epidemic ravaged the world. James Smith, an erstwhile literature professor and one of the few survivors of the disease, lives in a wild, rural area close to what was once San Francisco. After the collapse of society because of the plague, those who escaped the disease reverted to tribalism. For their subsistence, they rely on hunting and fishing. At the start of the story we meet Smith accompanied by his three grandchildren. He wistfully reminisces about better times, continually bemoaning the fact that the new generations have lost the learning of the past, regressing so far that they are unable to string together sentences in “proper” English. At the children’s insistence, Smith, whom they call “Granser” with a mixture of affection and scorn, recounts the horrors of the epidemic and the early days of the new world order.
I must say that the intial parts of the novella did not particularly impress me. Before he gets going with the core of the story, London needs to give us some background, hence the initial chapters emphasizing the contrast between the old “cultured” man and the young uneducated “savages”. To be honest, however, I found their bickering rather tiresome. Also, as is wont to happen with old “futuristic” novels, the author’s imagining of the “developed world” of 2013 is, with hindsight, quite off the mark, with a description of a future that is more or less like 1912 with extra perks.
It is when we get to the story of the pandemic proper that the novella comes into its own. Here London gives his imagination free rein, and the descriptions of the rapid spread of the disease provoke spine-tingling horror. So does his portrayal of a society in collapse. In the context of a disaster, normal rules of humanity break down and the class inequalities inherent in an unfair and unjust societies merely exacerbate the regression into chaos.
Although I wouldn’t classify it as one of London’s best or most typical works, this novella is worth exploring at least for its historical interest. Unfortunately, it also provides some timely reading.
Read a full illustrated review at: https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-scarlet-plague-by-jack-london.html
And so it was that I came across Jack London’s early post-apocalyptic novella The Scarlet Plague. Originally published in 1912, this work is set in 2073, sixty years after a deadly epidemic ravaged the world. James Smith, an erstwhile literature professor and one of the few survivors of the disease, lives in a wild, rural area close to what was once San Francisco. After the collapse of society because of the plague, those who escaped the disease reverted to tribalism. For their subsistence, they rely on hunting and fishing. At the start of the story we meet Smith accompanied by his three grandchildren. He wistfully reminisces about better times, continually bemoaning the fact that the new generations have lost the learning of the past, regressing so far that they are unable to string together sentences in “proper” English. At the children’s insistence, Smith, whom they call “Granser” with a mixture of affection and scorn, recounts the horrors of the epidemic and the early days of the new world order.
I must say that the intial parts of the novella did not particularly impress me. Before he gets going with the core of the story, London needs to give us some background, hence the initial chapters emphasizing the contrast between the old “cultured” man and the young uneducated “savages”. To be honest, however, I found their bickering rather tiresome. Also, as is wont to happen with old “futuristic” novels, the author’s imagining of the “developed world” of 2013 is, with hindsight, quite off the mark, with a description of a future that is more or less like 1912 with extra perks.
It is when we get to the story of the pandemic proper that the novella comes into its own. Here London gives his imagination free rein, and the descriptions of the rapid spread of the disease provoke spine-tingling horror. So does his portrayal of a society in collapse. In the context of a disaster, normal rules of humanity break down and the class inequalities inherent in an unfair and unjust societies merely exacerbate the regression into chaos.
Although I wouldn’t classify it as one of London’s best or most typical works, this novella is worth exploring at least for its historical interest. Unfortunately, it also provides some timely reading.
Read a full illustrated review at: https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-scarlet-plague-by-jack-london.html
This review is part of my new blog series, Reading the Plague. I'm reading a new work of plague literature or nonfiction book about disease or epidemics every month to try and reckon with the ways our lives have shifted in response to COVID-19. If you're interested, join me here.
It took just over a century for Jack London’s major predictions, in his 1912 pandemic tale The Scarlet Plague, to expire.
By 2013, no new fever had come to mow down the masses, the United States hadn’t replaced its executive agencies with a board of magnates, and society as we knew it remained intact. On smaller details as it pertains to living in a world with SARS-CoV2, however, the novel is much closer to the mark, assessing the collective despair of a world-changing event with a steady, sober gaze. London’s plague, killing its victims within hours, rips the world apart in a matter of months, but the damage, in a darkly familiar way, is a slow burn. It’s much more sorrowful than alarmist, more defeated than defiant. London’s work is more prescient in feeling than anything else. Reading The Scarlet Plague is like reading the headlines, only in a world where misfortune brought us a more effective killer.
It’s important to note that we don’t absorb humanity’s downfall first-hand––Granser, formerly Professor James Smith, recounts it to other characters decades after the fact, clad in animal skin, looking out over the deserted remnants of the West Coast. By now, the few survivors are even fewer, their descendants clustered into traveling bands of hunter-gatherers that retain only the smallest remembrances of the California that used to be––calling themselves the “Santa Rosans,” the “Chauffeurs,” the “Carmelitos.” The world of Before, of universities, coffee, and the written word, is nothing more than a deep, nostalgic sigh in Granser’s chest.
Owing to this retrospective approach, London’s chronicling of institutions falling apart and survivors resorting to violence and cruelty takes on a mournful tone, the cataclysmic events transpiring like dominoes, inevitable––because, looking from the future, it is. Without careful attention, a work like this can read like it’s devoid of tension, the essential dramatic question, Will he survive? answered simply by way of Granser’s presence in the future. But London ditches the traditional suspense knowingly, substituting for it something akin to hypnotism. Halfway through the novel, James watches someone break the windows of a store and set it aflame following the destruction even as he knows how it ends and that it won’t be stopped. “I did not go to the grocery-man’s assistance,” he divulges. “The time for such acts had already passed. Civilization was crumbling, and it was each for himself.”
This angle is The Scarlet Plague‘s fatalist stock, forming the basis of its blunt and bitter flavor. There is no “fight” for survival in this story, not really: London approaches this narrative from the corner of a writer steeped in stories of survival, and how drawn-out and passive it can sometimes be, lending the novel a sense of being outmatched as a human against larger and more powerful natural forces, precisely how any outbreak is wont to make one feel.
The sensation is paired with a hearty portion of musing about how all man’s efforts were for nought––London writes that “the fleeting systems lapse like foam.” A bit melodramatic for readers looking for a pragmatic, hopeful attitude in times of crisis, but it’s humanity’s party and it can cry if it wants to, and also, what else is there to do?
The Scarlet Plague makes a frequent subject of the bigger, pitiable picture, often acting as more a collective story than one of James Smith alone. It features lots of “we,” whether it be the “we” of the human race, or the “we” of the stragglers James finds himself trying to wait out the plague with, until, of course, they die. This lens, though, comes with consequences, namely those affecting the composition and complexity of character.
Because London’s focus is so wide, and his aim so collective, he writes arguments, as opposed to people. James, for instance, is essentially history’s vehicle, with wants, and later, regrets, that make appearances in the story, but never back him into a corner to reveal the contents of his moral fabric. For the humans in The Scarlet Plague, a universal substance is revealed early on and never refuted: they are creatures who resort to base means to survive when there is nothing left. It is true, even and especially, for James himself.
But trouble arrives in later chapters when London tries to introduce some interpersonal conflict, after society has collapsed, when James encounters some other survivors, and is subject to their cruelty after years wandering rural California alone––one in particular, who takes the name “Chauffeur” as a symbol to assert his pride over the fallen elite he once served. It is there that his complexity stops. An argument and not a person, Chauffeur’s exaggerated and ceaseless brutality is used to contest that violence and selfishness win out in a world with no structure. He’s also a former member of the working class, which London uses to argue that the poor and overworked, long pushed to the margins of society, will take up Rousseau’s promise and eat the rich, if pushed far enough. These points are intriguing, but the apparatus that’s used to make them isn’t. Even more distilled is Chauffeur’s wife-prisoner, the once wealthy, once ruling class Vesta, who is perfectly beautiful, perfectly pitiable, and little more than a walking symbol of grandeur brought low.
It makes sense, though, however ruthlessly it strips the characters, because London makes clear that in this circumstance, the makings of character have no bearing: “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.”
It took just over a century for Jack London’s major predictions, in his 1912 pandemic tale The Scarlet Plague, to expire.
By 2013, no new fever had come to mow down the masses, the United States hadn’t replaced its executive agencies with a board of magnates, and society as we knew it remained intact. On smaller details as it pertains to living in a world with SARS-CoV2, however, the novel is much closer to the mark, assessing the collective despair of a world-changing event with a steady, sober gaze. London’s plague, killing its victims within hours, rips the world apart in a matter of months, but the damage, in a darkly familiar way, is a slow burn. It’s much more sorrowful than alarmist, more defeated than defiant. London’s work is more prescient in feeling than anything else. Reading The Scarlet Plague is like reading the headlines, only in a world where misfortune brought us a more effective killer.
It’s important to note that we don’t absorb humanity’s downfall first-hand––Granser, formerly Professor James Smith, recounts it to other characters decades after the fact, clad in animal skin, looking out over the deserted remnants of the West Coast. By now, the few survivors are even fewer, their descendants clustered into traveling bands of hunter-gatherers that retain only the smallest remembrances of the California that used to be––calling themselves the “Santa Rosans,” the “Chauffeurs,” the “Carmelitos.” The world of Before, of universities, coffee, and the written word, is nothing more than a deep, nostalgic sigh in Granser’s chest.
Owing to this retrospective approach, London’s chronicling of institutions falling apart and survivors resorting to violence and cruelty takes on a mournful tone, the cataclysmic events transpiring like dominoes, inevitable––because, looking from the future, it is. Without careful attention, a work like this can read like it’s devoid of tension, the essential dramatic question, Will he survive? answered simply by way of Granser’s presence in the future. But London ditches the traditional suspense knowingly, substituting for it something akin to hypnotism. Halfway through the novel, James watches someone break the windows of a store and set it aflame following the destruction even as he knows how it ends and that it won’t be stopped. “I did not go to the grocery-man’s assistance,” he divulges. “The time for such acts had already passed. Civilization was crumbling, and it was each for himself.”
This angle is The Scarlet Plague‘s fatalist stock, forming the basis of its blunt and bitter flavor. There is no “fight” for survival in this story, not really: London approaches this narrative from the corner of a writer steeped in stories of survival, and how drawn-out and passive it can sometimes be, lending the novel a sense of being outmatched as a human against larger and more powerful natural forces, precisely how any outbreak is wont to make one feel.
The sensation is paired with a hearty portion of musing about how all man’s efforts were for nought––London writes that “the fleeting systems lapse like foam.” A bit melodramatic for readers looking for a pragmatic, hopeful attitude in times of crisis, but it’s humanity’s party and it can cry if it wants to, and also, what else is there to do?
The Scarlet Plague makes a frequent subject of the bigger, pitiable picture, often acting as more a collective story than one of James Smith alone. It features lots of “we,” whether it be the “we” of the human race, or the “we” of the stragglers James finds himself trying to wait out the plague with, until, of course, they die. This lens, though, comes with consequences, namely those affecting the composition and complexity of character.
Because London’s focus is so wide, and his aim so collective, he writes arguments, as opposed to people. James, for instance, is essentially history’s vehicle, with wants, and later, regrets, that make appearances in the story, but never back him into a corner to reveal the contents of his moral fabric. For the humans in The Scarlet Plague, a universal substance is revealed early on and never refuted: they are creatures who resort to base means to survive when there is nothing left. It is true, even and especially, for James himself.
But trouble arrives in later chapters when London tries to introduce some interpersonal conflict, after society has collapsed, when James encounters some other survivors, and is subject to their cruelty after years wandering rural California alone––one in particular, who takes the name “Chauffeur” as a symbol to assert his pride over the fallen elite he once served. It is there that his complexity stops. An argument and not a person, Chauffeur’s exaggerated and ceaseless brutality is used to contest that violence and selfishness win out in a world with no structure. He’s also a former member of the working class, which London uses to argue that the poor and overworked, long pushed to the margins of society, will take up Rousseau’s promise and eat the rich, if pushed far enough. These points are intriguing, but the apparatus that’s used to make them isn’t. Even more distilled is Chauffeur’s wife-prisoner, the once wealthy, once ruling class Vesta, who is perfectly beautiful, perfectly pitiable, and little more than a walking symbol of grandeur brought low.
It makes sense, though, however ruthlessly it strips the characters, because London makes clear that in this circumstance, the makings of character have no bearing: “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.”
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
A plague destroys civilization and an old man recounts how it all used to be to his descendants who now live in a tribal state and mock him. My problem is that London is too narrow minded and in love with the idea that civilized intellectuals are so soft that he can't envisage a way they would adapt to a primitive world as story tellers or historians.