The Scarlet Plague

Jack London's 1912 novella is set sixty years after a pandemic has collapsed civilization, leaving elderly former English professor James Howard Smith as one of the last survivors of the pre-plague world, recounting the collapse to his grandsons on the California coast. Written long before post-apocalyptic fiction became a genre, it is historically significant in exactly that way — the CDC has cited it in scholarly pandemic literature, and it gained renewed attention during COVID. At novella length it's compact and readable. The honest caveat: by modern standards the plot is thin, the characters are limited, and the content includes domestic violence and the on-page murder of a female character. London's worldview is naturalist and secular with no redemptive framework. Best suited for readers interested in the history of science fiction and pandemic narratives rather than those seeking a satisfying contemporary story.