Amazon.com description: Product Description: A story picturing a world that has reverted to savagery. Early in the twenty-first century. we are told, the scarlet plague attacked the world, wiping out its population with the exception of a few scattered survivors, of whom Professor James Howard Smith was one. Somewhere about the year 2073 this same Professor Smith, now a doddering old man, is depicted as telling the story of the great world that was, and of its downfall to a group of half naked little barbarians, his great grandchildren.