The Book Depository The Scarlet Plague by Jack London
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Price: £15.61
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: The Scarlet Plague : Paperback : Hesperus Press Ltd : 9781843911753 : 1843911752 : 15 Oct 2008 : An old man walks along deserted railway tracks, long since unused and overgrown; beside him a young, feral boy helps him along. It has been 60 years since the great Red Death wiped out mankind, and the handful of survivors from all walks of life have established their own civilization and their own hierarchy in a savage world. Art, science, and all learning has been lost, and the young descendants of the healthy know nothing of the world that was&;nothing but myths and make-believe. The old. The Book Depository The Scarlet Plague by Jack London - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9781843911753
MPN: 1843911752
GTIN: 9781843911753
Author: Daisy Daisy
Rating: 5
Review: I got this as a free book on Kindle and had not read any of Jack London's work before but was very happy to discover another author that I really liked. His story telling is very good, eloquent and the tale gripped me right to the end... and yes, it did end too quickly. Maybe leaving it open for further novels? I generally like classic authors such as Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle - basically the tellers of fine tales of the adventure variety. So it's rare for me to find modern day authors of whom I would read everything they wrote. Five stars!
Author: P. J. Dunn
Rating: 3
Review: Well I suppose this is fairly apposite reading in the same week I get my first vaccination against covid-19. To add to its pertinence the timeline of this tale is not that far of the current challenging year of 2020/21 either. Jack London sets the spread of the plague his story in the summer of 2013, which is 101 years after the book’s first publication. The story itself opens in 2073, sixty years after the Scarlet Death / Scarlet Plague has burnt out. London’s “Scarlet Plague” is a very quick acting plague with people dying within just hours of showing any symptoms (2 hours in one case). It’s also thankfully a very read as a book – 128 pages of rather undemanding text mostly in a fairly large point size. I said “thankfully”, as this is not what exactly in the same class as the author’s earlier “Call of the Wild” etc. One has to make some allowance for it being very early SF of course but Kipling for instance could manage much better SF in “With The Night Mail” in 1905 . One would like to make an allowance for it being an early work of London’s, but his much more fondly remembered “The Call of the Wild” was actually published nine years previously in 1903, and “White Fang” in 1906. Don’t get me wrong it’s not awful, it’s just not anywhere as good as one thought one might expect to get from that author. I would say however that this particular edition, in the “Radium Age Science Fiction Series”, is beautifully presented.
