The book was noted in 2020 as having been very similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially given London wrote it at a time when the world was not as quickly connected by travel as it is today.

James Smith is one of the survivors of the era before the scarlet plague hit and is still left alive in the San Francisco area, and he travels with his grandsons Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip.

The then future year of 2013 is described as a plutocratic society reminiscent of London's other books such as the Iron Heel with Smith recalling "Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates".

London published The Scarlet Plague in book form at a point in his career that biographers and critics have called a "professional decline", from September 1912 to May 1916.

[5] Jack London was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story "The Masque of the Red Death", though the virus itself has different symptoms.

[6] Both Poe's story and London's fall into a genre of apocalyptic fiction featuring a universal plague that nearly wipes out humanity.

Other examples include Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969), Stephen King's The Stand (1978).,[7] and René Barjavel's Ravage (1943)