Short Fiction London, Jack: The Red One (Short Stories). v1. 23 Aug 2022

[GrannyGrump]

>> The Red One:
A scientist collecting butterflies in the jungle encounters a giant red sphere from another world worshiped by savage cannibal head-hunters performing human sacrifices.

>> The Hussy:
A man goes to Ecuador to work on the railway, and ultimately seek a huge nugget of gold, guided by a beautiful, enigmatic Indian maiden.

>> Like Argus of the Ancient Times:
Grandfather Tarwater, viewed as doddering and senile by his family, takes off for the rigors of the Klondike goldfields to seek his fortune. A charming and humorous story.

>> The Princess:
Three hobos brag about how each left a privileged upbringing, lost an arm in the South Seas, and married a princess.

Arthur C. Clarke said in a note to his 1983 short story collection The Sentinel that:

“Some time after ‘The Sentinel’ was published (1948), I was asked if I had ever read Jack London’s ‘The Red One.’ As I’d never even heard of it, I hastened to do so, and was deeply impressed by his thirty-year-earlier tale of the ‘Star-Born,’ an enormous sphere lying for ages in the jungles of Guadalcanal. I wonder if this is the first treatment of a theme which has suddenly become topical, now that the focus of the SETI debate has changed from ‘Where’s Everyone?’ to the even more puzzling ‘Where Are Their Artifacts?’”

(Note that “The Sentinal,” together with several other stories by Clarke, inspired the epic film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”)

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John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist, and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing.

His most famous works are adventure stories set in in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, such as The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build a Fire”, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “Love of Life”. He also wrote about the South Pacific and about adventures at sea. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction, and wrote tales of fantasy and mystery & suspense.

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The collection The Red One by Jack London (1876–1916) was first published in 1918. This ebook is in the public domain worldwide, because the author died more than 100 years ago, and it was published before 1927.
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[svenlind]

Thank you for yet another interesting book