The Scarlet Plague

Imagine a super sick germ called the Scarlet Plague that spreads super fast and kills almost everyone in the whole world in just a few weeks back in the future year 2013. A smart old grandpa who lived through it tells his wild grandkids—like Hare-Lip and Edwin—about how cities like San Francisco turned into ghost towns, people ran and hid, doctors tried to make medicine but failed, and everyone from rich bosses to poor folks died. Now, 60 years later in 2073, people live like cavemen, forgetting how to read or build stuff, and Grandpa tries to teach them about the old smart world before it all fell apart forever.

Jack London's 'The Scarlet Plague,' published in 1912, is a prescient post-apocalyptic novella framed as an oral tale told by an elderly survivor to his semi-savage grandchildren in the year 2073. Set against the backdrop of a catastrophic bacterial plague that erupts in 2013, the story chronicles the swift collapse of modern civilization in San Francisco and beyond. The unnamed narrator, a former university professor, recounts how the Scarlet Plague—a highly contagious, airborne bacterium with a 100% fatality rate—decimates humanity within weeks, overwhelming medical science despite frantic efforts to develop serums and enforce quarantines. Society unravels amid panic, looting, and mass deaths, with the elite fleeing in airships only to succumb as well, highlighting the plague's indiscriminate horror. Sixty years later, in a regressed world of tribal savagery along the California coast, the grandfather imparts fragments of lost knowledge to his brutish descendants—Hare-Lip, Edwin, and Hoo-Hoo—who embody humanity's degeneration into illiteracy and cannibalism. Through vivid flashbacks, London explores the narrator's desperate flight with his family, encounters with marauding gangs, and futile attempts to preserve culture amid starvation and violence. The narrative culminates in a poignant meditation on civilization's fragility, the inevitability of entropy, and the fleeting nature of human progress, serving as a stark warning against overreliance on technology and social complacency.