Histories of Science Fiction usually begin with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and then skip rapidly to 1926, when the first American science fiction magazine was founded. But there was quite a bit of SF published in the first quarter of the 20th Century, and one of the leaders in the field at the time was Jack London. London is remembered today for his stories of outdoor adventure ("The Call of the Wild," "The Sea Wolf," "White Fang"), but he also wrote a lot of SF-- four novels, plus about a dozen short stories, give or take (depending on how you define "science fiction"-- the boundaries were not so clear back then).
This Kindle anthology gives you a lot to read for 99 cents, and includes nearly all of London's SF-- all four novels, plus 11 short stories (a few of which are only borderline SF). (It fails to include only three of what are usually considered London's SF short stories.) The navigation is good (there is a working table of contents that will take you to any of the stories or novels, but no navigation to a specific chapter within the novels), and the text is nearly free of typos.
Taking the novels first: BEFORE ADAM (1906) is a "Quest for Fire"-style story of life in prehistoric times. After an introduction in which the narrator's dreams turn out to be "racial memories" of his proto-human ancestors (this was probably not regarded as quite so far-fetched an idea in 1906), we get an exciting, and rather plausible, adventure story set in caveman times. THE SCARLET PLAGUE (1915) is a very early post-apocalyptic novel; in 2073, an old man, the last survivor of the plague which wiped out nearly all human life in 2013, tells his grandchildren what life was like before all civilization was destroyed, and how he survived the collapse of society. Again, well-written and plausible, and clearly an influence on a lot of later SF.
THE IRON HEEL (1907) is historically important-- it was one of the first (or possibly THE first) dystopian novels. Written decades before Orwell's "1984" or Huxley's "Brave New World," it tells of a fascist dictatorship that took over the United States in the 1910s. It is also interestingly structured-- it is presented as a manuscript written in the 1930s, with an "introduction" and "footnotes" written by a historian of the year 2600. Unfortunately, the book is NOT a good read; it is boring and didactic, with long sections of socialist theorizing, and no real action until the last few chapters.
THE STAR ROVER (1915) is a long novel, but a fun one. It was, as they say in Hollywood, "inspired by a true story": in the early 20th Century, prisons in the U.S. tortured recalcitrant inmates by binding them in painfully-tight strait-jackets for days on end. Ed Morrell, an inmate paroled from San Quentin, wrote about how, when he was tortured with "the jacket," his mind would dissociate from his body and wander around San Francisco. In this novel, the narrator, presented as one of Morrell's fellow-inmates, does Morrell one better; when he is bound in the jacket, he roams through time as well as space, and relives his past lives. This device permits London to throw in all sorts of historic adventures, from a Roman soldier in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, to a child victim of the 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre in Utah, to a British sailor shipwrecked in Korea in the 1600s (plus three or four more). The result may be episodic, but London could certainly write adventure fiction, so the novel is still a very good read.
The short stories are a mixed bag. "The Red One" (1918) is one of the best short SF stories of the early 20th century, about a sailor shipwrecked in the South Seas who finds that the object venerated by the island's natives is actually an alien spacecraft that crashed on earth in the remote past. "A Relic of the Pliocene" (1901) is an exciting tale of a prospector in the Klondike who finds, and kills, the world's last surviving mammoth.
Some of the other stories have not aged as well. "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910) is horribly racist, telling of how the U.S. and its European allies save the world from the evil Chinese race by wiping out the whole population of China with bacteriological weapons. (This is depicted as a GOOD thing!) "Goliah" (1908) is equally repellent; a scientist develops a radium-based disintegrator ray (a cool idea for 1908), and uses it to assassinate business and political leaders (not a cool idea, ever) until he is made the benevolent dictator of the world and institutes a socialist utopia (which may have seemed like a good idea in 1908, but didn't turn out so well whenever it was tried). "The Rejuvenation of Major Rathbone" (1899) and "The Shadow and the Flash" (1903) both have interesting SF ideas, but the stories are supposed to be funny and the humor now seems dated.
Some of the stories are closer to supernatural horror than science fiction; "The Man with the Gash" (1900) is a so-so ghost story; "Planchette" (1906) is an excellent horror story (with, as a bonus, an exciting scene in which a posessed horse tries to kill its rider), but is not SF unless you count Ouija boards as "scientific."
Bottom line: Some of London's SF is still very readable; some has dated badly; overall, this is a good anthology to buy if you have an interest in the history of science fiction, or if you are a fan of Jack London's other writings.
