Jack London (1876-1916) had a difficult beginning in life. His mother, Flora Wellman, was a medium who said that an Indian chief was her spirit guide, and who lived with William Chaney, an astrologer. Finding herself pregnant, she attempted suicide. When the baby was born he was handed over to a former slave until Flora married John London. Jack (above) discovered all this by reading old newspaper accounts. He contacted Chaney, who denied paternity on the ground that he was impotent.

Jack gave up on school, and the public library became his classroom. He worked in a cannery, bought a sloop and became an oyster pirate, worked in a jute mill and a power plant. But he ended up a tramp and was arrested and jailed for vagrancy. In 1897 he joined the gold rush to the Klondike where his health was irreparably damaged. But it all gave him plenty of material, and, determined to “sell his brains”, he had his first story published in 1898.

London's style is typically lush but his viewpoint is sceptical and dystopian. The Scarlet Plague looks ahead 160 years to a time beyond the end of civilisation. An old man and a boy, dressed in skins, walk along a derelict railway near what was once San Francisco bay. “What is money, Granser?” asks the child. Then he produces a tarnished coin. The old man laughs: “2012 ... that was the year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the last coins minted, for the Scarlet Death came in 2013.” Granser - who was a professor in the old world - recalls how Man almost destroyed the planet. Now, the few human survivors eke out a primitive living and nature reclaims her own.

Like The Tempest - that much earlier parable on the themes of exploitation and greed - London's story reminds us of the dangers we still court with our careless ways: “The red plague rid you, for learning me your language.

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, foreword by Tony Robinson
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