The year is 2073. An uncontrollable disease, the Scarlet Plague, has wiped out most of the world's people six decades earlier. The cities are destroyed. An old man, James Howard Smith, wanders the depopulated land with his three grandsons. They are hunter-gatherers now, but Smith still remembers the arrival of the plague - the fear, the sudden deaths, the fires, the fighting and looting - and the world before the pandemic, the days of culture and plentiful food. He tries to tell his story, but the three boys can scarcely comprehend his tale of the destruction of a world long gone... Originally published in 1912, Jack London 's dystopian novella The Scarlet Plague is an eerily prescient book, and a timely warning about the fragility of civilisation.