Jack London’s plague novel, in which the world’s population has been reduced to a few scattered bands of primitive scavengers, has influenced subsequent science-fiction apocalypses and dystopias from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four to the movies Road Warrior and Idiocracy. Outside the ruins of San Francisco, a former UC Berkeley professor of literature recounts the chilling sequence of events which led to his current lowly state a gruesome pandemic which killed nearly every living soul on the planet, in a matter of days. Modern civilization tottered and fell, and a new race of barbarians the western world's brutalized workers assumed power everywhere. Over the space of a few decades, all learning has been lost. Unlike the professor on Gilligan's Island, the narrator is the least useful member of a thriving tribe, whose younger generation (who boast names like Hoo-Hoo and Har-Lip) are mostly descended from a the tribe's brutish founder. He was known only by the title of his former occupation, so the tribe's name is: Chauffeur. A bleak, at times darkly humorous glimpse into the future by an author best known for red-blooded adventure yarns set in the Klondike Gold Rush.

The Scarlet Plague (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series)

Literature & Fiction

LONDON, JACK.

United States

HiLoBooks

"SHE: Do you like Kipling? HE: I don't know, I've never Kippled!" If you've never read Rudyard Kipling's science fiction, then you've never Kippled. Having achieved international fame with The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, Kim, and his Just So Stories, in 1905 Kipling serialized a thrilling science fiction novella, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D, in which the reader learns — while following the exploits of an intercontinental mail dirigible battling foul weather — about a planet-wide Aerial Board of Control, which enforces a rigid system of command and control not only in the skies (which are increasingly crowded with every manner of zeppelin) but in world affairs too. Kipling got so excited by his own utopian vision that when the story first appeared in McClure's Magazine, it was accompanied by phony advertisements for dirigible and aeronautical products that he'd written, plus other ersatz magazine clippings. In one of these latter, we read that the Aerial Board of Control had effectively outlawed war in 1967 — by "reserving to every nation the right of waging war so long as it does not interfere with traffic and all that that implies." This turns out to imply a great deal! In Kipling's 1912 followup story, "As Easy As A.B.C.," which is set 65 years after With the Night Mail, we learn just how complete the Aerial Board's control is over the social and economic affairs of every nation. When a mob of disgruntled "Serviles" in the District of Northern Illinois demands the return of democracy, the A.B.C. sends a team of troubleshooters (from England, Russia, Japan, and Italy) and a fleet of 200 zeppelins to "take such steps as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and all that that implies." Democracy, it seems, is an impediment to the smooth flow of international commerce — so it was abolished during the 20th century, along with newspapers. What happens when the A.B.C. troubleshooters confront the democrats? Trouble!

With the Night Mail: Two Yarns About the Aerial Board of Control (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series)

Kipling., Rudyard

What would you do if you alone had discovered that the entire planet was about to be engulfed in a belt of poisonous "ether" from outer space  and that all humanity would die?Arthur Conan Doyle's intrepid Professor Challenger invites a hand-picked crew of adventurers and scientists  the very same comrades with whom he had romped through a South American jungle crawling with prehistoric monsters and beast-men in The Lost World, science fiction's first popular dinoasaurs-still-live tale. This adventure, however, takes place entirely in Challenger's home (in his wife's boudoir, in fact) outside London, which has been fortified with several hours' worth of oxygen. Challenger tells his friends: We are assisting at a tremendous and awful function.”Like astronauts strapping themselves into a rocket, Challenger & Co. assemble in front of a picture window to witness the end of all life on the planet. As birds plummet from the sky, trains crash, and men and women topple over before their horrified gaze, they debate everything from the possibilities of the universe to the abysses that lie upon either side of our material existence,” to the ideal scientific mind." If the point of other apocalyptic tales is to model proper action in the face of certain disaster, Doyle's offbeat adventure models a proper attitude: scholarly sprezzatura, nerves of steel, stoic calm.Professor Challenger himself is a larger than life character  strong as a bull, the smartest man alive, and an enormous egotist who nevertheless is good company whether he's hunting dinosaurs or waiting for the end of the world.

The Poison Belt: Being an account of another adventure of Prof. George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Prof. Summerlee, and Mr. E.D. Malone, the ... (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series)

Conan, Doyle Arthur

If representatives of an advanced civilization were to visit our planet today, would they be impressed or dismayed by the way we live? When three adventurers, Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot, are marooned on a South Sea island, they discover an ancient crystal sepulchre. Inside are two Atlanteans who have been in a state of suspended animation for 250,000 years! One of the awakened sleepers, the haughty Lord Oro, is the last of the Sons of Wisdom, a superior race who'd relied on their advanced technology to subjugate the planet's lesser peoples. The other Atlantean is Oro's daughter, Yva, heiress to the title of Queen of the Earth... who falls in love with Arbuthnot. Using astral projection, Lord Oro visits London and the battlefields of the Western Front. Unimpressed with the state of the world in the early 20th century, he sets out to do what he's apparently done once before — use a colossal gyroscope to drown the planet, and restart the course of human history. A darkly humorous look at the politics and conflicts of his own era by an author best known for swashbuckling adventure novels (including the hugely popular King Solomon's Mines) set in the context of the Scramble for Africa.

When the World Shook (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Haggard, H.Rider

Science Fiction

Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later — in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Not only have his fellow Londoners forgotten most of what humankind used to know, before civilization collapsed, but they don’t particularly care to re-learn any of it. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era’s smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful. That is, until northern English and Welsh tribes threaten London — at which point he sets about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.\nShanks's post-apocalyptic novel, a pessimistic satire on Wellsian techno-utopian novels, was first published in 1920.

The People of the Ruins (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series)

Edward, Shanks

In the far future, an unnamed narrator, who along with what remains of the human race dwells uneasily in an underground fortress-city surrounded by brooding, chaotic, relentless Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, "Ab-humans," Brutes, and enormous slugs and spiders, follows a telepathic distress signal into the unfathomable darkness.The Earth's surface is frozen, and what's worse — at some point in the distant past, overreaching scientists breached "the Barrier of Life" that separates our dimension from one populated by "monstrosities and Forces" who have sought humankind's destruction ever since. Armed only with a lightsaber-esque weapon called a Diskos, and fortified only by his sense of Honor, our hero braves every sort of terror en route to rescue a woman he loves but has never met.Hodgson wrote in an archaic style that adds to the story's ever-mounting sense of uncanny anxiety. HiLoBooks' edition of his novel omits two sections which have until now prevented it from reaching a wider audience: the tale's romantic prefatory conceit and its lengthy, relatively uneventful dénouement. Our otherwise unabridged version begins and ends with the most dramatic moments in this epic tale: chapters Two and Eleven.

The Night Land: A Love Tale (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series)

HODGSON, WILLIAM HOPE

<div>When war breaks out in Europe -- modern, aerial war whose tactics include displacing entire populations -- British civilization collapses overnight. The ironically named Theodore Savage, an educated and idle civil servant, must learn to survive by his wits in a new Britain... one where science and technology swiftly come to be regarded with superstitious awe and terror. The book -- by a women's rights activist often remembered today for her polemical plays, tracts and treatises -- was first published in 1922.</div>

Theodore Savage (The Radium Age Science Fiction Series)

Hamilton, Cicely

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