Sci-Fi Writer Jack London

For most people, classic author Jack London is considered an early pioneer of the naturalist movement and an undoubtably fierce advocate for wildlife. His most famous book, Call of the Wild, is on most high school reading lists, and his short story “To Build a Fire” still remains one of the best descriptions of being chilled to the bone ever written. Like Call of the Wild, many of his other novels, including White Fang and The Sea Wolf have seen multiple film adaptations over the last hundred years. Jack London is not widely considered to be a science fiction writer with few people even knowing he had contributed to the genre at all. However, his novel The Iron Heel and his short story “The Unparalleled Invasion” more than qualify for what would later become known as speculative fiction.

Speculative fiction, or “guessing the future,” as a genre of sci-fi would become famous with novels also commonly assigned in high school like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984. Both of those novels guessed a dystopian future where control was rule and personal freedom illegal. One of the reasons those books continue to be taught (at least as of this writing) is because of the parallels drawn to current society and warnings over succumbing to authoritative rule.  Jack London’s contribution to the genre is often overlooked because arguably the genre hadn’t been invented yet.

Cover to the Penguin Classics Edition

The Iron Heel, written in 1908, is significant for many reasons. Not only is it perhaps the earliest example of modern social speculative fiction ever written, but it is told as a first-person narrative from the point of view of a woman.

Coming from a male author this was literally unheard of at the time. The story is told by protagonist Avis Everhard from a found manuscript several centuries in the future. It covers the era between 1912 and 1932 when a socialist movement has taken hold and has a good chance of becoming a real political force.

In response to this an Oligarchy made up of robber barons squash the middle class and small businesses. They force farmers into a serfdom at the behest of the Mercenaries, a division of the army that is really the private strongarm of the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy makes side deals with certain unions in a bid to crush most of the others into nothing while creating a wonder city called Asgard that needs thousands of improvised proletarians to keep it going.

The Iron Heel was panned in literary circles at the time claiming “as a socialist tract it’s distinctly unconvincing,” but it did find love in the strangest place: Russia.

London frontispiece in The Iron Heel

In 1908 Russia was still ten years away from its own Revolution and almost eighty years away from sadly embracing the villains of this novel. The Iron Heel was made into a film twice by Russia.

The first time was in 1919 right on the heels (no pun intended) of their recent October Revolution and for the second time in 1999 after Russia had embraced their own Oligarch rule.

The second film entitled, Zheleznaya pyata oligarkhii , The Iron Heel of the Oligarchy, was written and directed by its star Aleksandr Bashirov and has some interesting visuals although it is tough to find with subtitles.

2016 saw a stage adaptation of The Iron Heel by Edward Einhorn which The New York Times called “food for thought with an appealing heart-on-your-sleeve warmth.”

While it’s clear to see and even root for the protagonists in The Iron Heel, especially as London himself was a devout socialist, another work of his, the short story “The Unparalleled Invasion,” is slightly more complicated, and by that I mean it’s horribly racist and promotes the genocide of an entire race of people.

Before I continue, I am not here to “cancel” or defend Jack London.

I think “The Unparalleled Invasion” is an important piece of science fiction that should be studied. It works not only through the lens of the time it was written, but also for its shocking parallels to current history.

“The Unparalleled Invasion” was first published in McClure’s in 1910 then later collected with other Jack London short stories in The Strength of the Strong in 1914.

The story, which starts in 1922, describes the growing threat of China which has broken free from Japanese control to form its own superpower.

By 1975 China’s population is double that of the entire western world combined.

The United States, helped by other western powers, launches an invasion force using biological weapons that kill every single Chinese person. After successfully containing the plague from spreading, the US (along with other Western powers) colonize China.

This leads to a rapturous period of “splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output.” In the end, the conquering nations agree to never again use the biological weapons against future nations.

It’s significant to point out Jack London, who was a war correspondent in 1904 for the Russo-Japanese war, was looking through his future lens predicting many things to come.

Biological weapons (which were actually used to devastating effect in the upcoming First World War, and then later banned for use in all warfare) were used for genocide of the entirety of China in this short story much the same way the Germans would later attempt to wipe Jews off the face of the earth with their own chemical gas chambers in World War II.  Other parallels include China’s correctly-predicted huge population growth and the conspiracy theory surrounding the creation of COVID-19 as a biological weapon.

Racists and white supremacists have held “The Unparalleled Invasion” in high esteem much the same way they do The Turner Diaries or Imperium, while many academics claim the racist tone of the work is intentional, citing it as a “strident warning against race hatred and its paranoia.”

H. Bruce Franklin in his book War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination doesn’t let Jack London off the hook that easy. Franklin points out the story glorifies the genocide of Asians with a superweapon, in this case a deadly virus. The case against Jack London does have merit as it is impossible not to see this short story as anything more than a unique take on a “Yellow Peril” tale of Asian invasion.

Jack London died of debatable circumstances in 1916 at only 40 years old.

Regardless of London’s original intention in writing “The Unparalleled Invasion,” the wrong people have certainty perverted this for the wrong reasons over the past one hundred years. While that isn’t entirely his fault it is without question an incendiary read. It’s also an important work of science fiction that deserves debate and continued academic analysis.

The best way to describe this would be using Jack London’s own words from his preface to The Iron Heel: “… is an important historical document. To the historian it bristles with errors⁠—not errors of fact, but errors of interpretation.” The Strength of the Strong, The Iron Heel, as well as all Jack London’s other writings are public domain and free to download.

Give them a read and decide for yourself.

Fred Shahadi is an award-winning filmmaker, playwright, and television writer living in Los Angeles.