Jack London, legendary author and Robert E. Howard’s literary idol, would have celebrated his one hundred and forty-seventh birthday today. That’s as good an excuse as any to take a quick look at his underappreciated short stories written within the SFF genre.

For those just vaguely aware of London's work, Call of the Wild and White Fang might come to mind. Both of those are novels. With a gun to their head, such persons could, just maybe, name "To Build a Fire", Jack's most famous short story. What is known to just a relative few is that Jack London was a gifted and pioneering writer of science fiction and fantasy. Click here to check out London's ISFDB entry. Four novels. Scroll down to 'Short Stories' and there are over thirty tales by London considered to be SF or fantasy.

As author and historian, Dale L. Walker, once noted:

“London's true métier was the short story. (...) London's true genius lay in the short form, 7,500 words and under, where the flood of images in his teeming brain and the innate power of his narrative gift were at once constrained and freed.”

In the 'Collections' category is Selected Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories (1979), featuring a handful of SFF tales by London. The publisher was Fictioneer Books, a small press headed by comics author/pulp scholar, David Anthony Kraft. Kraft's selections are good, but there aren't very many of them.

What most interests me is the fact that--apparently--P.Craig Russell did the cover and at least one interior illustration. I must admit that the cover is pretty underwhelming. However, I have higher hopes for the interior illo(s). In my opinion, 1973-1983 was Russell's best period. After that, he got a little more ethereal and stylized. Still excellent, but not as much in my wheelhouse. Style-wise, something like this splash page from Amazing Adventures #39 is roughly what I'm hoping to find in the London collection.

However, no way am I gonna hand over hard-earned pazoors to buy a book with a boring cover and maybe one PCR illustration. If any DMR readers out there are familiar with this edition, feel free to let me know in the comments or contact me via the 'Contact' button at the far upper right of this page.

If the collection above isn't the place to start, where should someone begin their journey of discovering Jack London's SFF tales? For quality one-stop shopping, I recommend Fantastic Tales (1998) from the University of Nebraska Press. This would appear to be part of the opening salvo from the new editor at the time which quickly led to the ‘Bison Frontiers of Imagination’ imprint. That editor unleashed a flood of pulp-centric reprints for well over a decade, featuring numerous editions from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Harold Lamb, Jules Verne and Before Adam from Jack London.

There was a changing of the guard sometime around 2015 and now the University of Nebraska publishes the same intersectional stuff, written in bafflegarble, that nearly all other academic presses indulge in. A damned shame. I hope the previous editor is doing well.

That UNP collection is well-done, but it's nowhere near comprehensive. For that, you need to turn to Leonaur Ltd., a UK company I've grown fond of over the past fifteen years. Their focus/specialty is quality Public Domain reprints and they do a fine job of it, in my opinion. Their three-volume series, 'The Collected Science Fiction and Fantasy of Jack London', delivers the goods. They might have missed one or two short stories--at most--but they also include the important, proto-Howardian novels like The Star-Rover and Before Adam. All three volumes add up to just over one thousand pages.

So, there ya go. My two debased shekels' worth of opinions. Get out there and read some Jack London.

A final, value-added DMR factoid: the legendary actor, Peter O'Toole, was a staunch fan of Jack London. He always mentioned London as his favorite author.