The Scarlet Plague

In 2073, James Smith travels through the depopulated San Francisco region with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip. The boys live as hunter-gatherers, speak a reduced language, and doubt explanations involving invisible germs. They ask their grandfather, whom they call Granser, to describe the world destroyed sixty years earlier by the scarlet plague.

Smith remembers being an English professor in 2013 when the disease appeared and spread with terrifying speed. Victims turned scarlet and died within minutes, leaving medicine little time to respond. Panic overtook institutions and neighborhoods as contagion was joined by fear, isolation, and violence. Smith's attempt to survive carries him from an organized university society into a landscape where older structures have disappeared.

Jack London frames The Scarlet Plague as a conversation between historical memory and a generation unable to imagine the lost world. The epidemic is not the only subject; the novella also asks how quickly knowledge, language, and social order can erode. Readers can compare Granser's attachment to education with his grandsons' practical adaptation. Neither perspective restores the past, and their misunderstandings show that preserving facts after catastrophe depends on who is willing and able to listen.