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Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London's The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published nearly a hundred years ago, it anticipated many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority. What begins as a war of words ends in scenes of harrowing violence as the state oligarchy, known as "the Iron Heel," moves to crush all opposition to its power.

Outside the ruins of San Francisco, a former UC Berkeley professor recounts the chilling sequence of events -- a gruesome pandemic which killed nearly every living soul on the planet, in a matter of days -- which led to his current lowly state. Modern civilization has fallen, and a new race of barbarians, descended from the world's brutalized workers, has assumed power. Over the space of a few decades, all learning has been lost.

The catastrophe happens in 2013; 2012 marks the centennial of the novel's first publication as a serial in London Magazine.

The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915. In the United Kingdom it was published under the title, The Jacket.

A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas straight-jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives. The accounts of these past lives form the body of the work. They are in effect a series of powerfully written, but disconnected and unresolved, short stories.

A young man in modern America is terrorized by visions of an earlier, primitive life. Across the enormous chasm of thousands of centuries, his consciousness has become entwined with that of Big-Tooth, an ancestor living at the dawn of humanity. Big-Tooth makes his home in Pleistocene Africa, a ferocious, fascinating younger world torn by incessant conflict between early humans and protohumans. Before Adam is a remarkable and provocative tale that thrust evolution further into the public spotlight in the early twentieth century and has since become a milestone of speculative fiction. The brilliance of the book lies not only in its telling but also in its imaginative projection of a mindset for early humans. Capitalizing on his recognized ability to understand animals, Jack London paints an arresting and dark portrait of how our distant ancestors thought about themselves and their world.

Jack London's fabled powers to entertain and enthrall are in full force in this collection of fifteen fantastic tales. The restless energy of his vision ranges far in time and space, from the psychological tension of an extraterrestrial encounter to a frontier tall tale of a trapper hunting a mammoth. London tells an effective Victorian gothic story and offers an intriguing consideration of the science and problems of invisibility. Particularly gripping are the well-imagined horrors and new worlds of the future, including a chilling novella depicting a world ravaged by an alien virus. These remarkable stories testify to the wide-ranging creative power of one of America's great writers.

Contents:

• A Curious Fragment - (1908) - shortstory
• A Relic of the Pliocene - (1901) - shortstory
• A Thousand Deaths - (1889) - shortstory
• Even Unto Death - (1900) - shortstory
• Goliah - (1908) - novelette
• Preface (Curious Fragments) - (1975) - essay by Philip José Farmer
• The Enemy of All the World - (1908) - shortstory
• The Red One - (1918) - novelette
• The Rejuvenation of Major Rathbone - (1899) - shortstory
• The Scarlet Plague - (1912) - novella
• The Shadow and the Flash - (1903) - shortstory
• The Strength of the Strong - (1911) - shortstory
• The Unparalleled Invasion - (1910) - shortstory
• War - (1911) - shortstory
• When the World Was Young - (1910) - shortstory
• Who Believes in Ghosts! - (1895) - shortstory

Has also been published as Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction.

Jack London is one of a number of important American authors who wrote science fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His works include future war stories, social projections, wonderful inventions and evolutionary fantasies. This original anthology includes London's famous short novels: The Scarlet Plague, a post-catastrophe story in which the lone survivor of a terrible plague in the twenty-first century unsuccessully tries to warn the youth of a primitive tribe about man's potential for self-destruction; and The Red One, which concerns an alien object, perhaps a spaceship, which came to earth thousands of years ago and is still worshipped by savages as a God. Nine shorter science fiction pieces round out the anthology to demonstrate London's very definite place in the history and development of science fiction.

Table of contents:

• Introduction · Richard Gid Powers
• "A Relic of the Pliocene" · Colliers Jan 12 '01
• "The Minions of Midas" · Pearson's Magazine (US) May '01
• "The Shadow and the Flash" · The Bookman Jun '03
• "A Curious Fragment" · Town Topics Dec 10 '08
• "Goliah" · The Bookman Feb '10
• "The Dream of Debs" · The International Socialist Review Jan '09
• "The Unparalleled Invasion" · McClure's Jul '10
• "When the World Was Young" · The Saturday Evening Post Sep 10 '10
• "The Strength of the Strong" · Hampton's Mar '11
• "The Scarlet Plague" · The London Magazine Jun '12
• Illustrations to "The Scarlet Plague" · Gordon Grant
• "The Red One" · Cosmopolitan Oct '18