On Monday Lucinda and I visited the Jack London State Historic Park. Since I was visiting where Jack London had lived and is buried, I figured the best thing to purchase in the gift shop would be one of his books. At the small museum I learned that he had written over 50 novels and died when he was only forty. That sounds like an impressive number of novels... but then I picked up The Scarlet Plague. I guess he was able to write so many by keeping them so short. Calling it a novella would be generous... It was just over 100 pages, had a huge font, and giant margins on a pretty small page.
The story is told by an old man in the future who was a professor at Berekeley when in 2013 a plague wiped out most of humankind. I found it interesting because London had written it back in 1912. He got some things right (like UCB and Stanford still being around) but it is funny when the narrator tells about how their airplanes could go almost 300mph and how newspapers were still the only way to get worldwide news. I'll give it a B.
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