Published by Colliers’s Weekly [could you imagine a weekly literary magazine in print today?], January 12, 1901, reading from the Science Fiction Stories of Jack London, pages 40-48

A Relic of the Pliocene falls into the realm of ‘tall tales’ from American folklore. It is also a curious mixture of London’s interest in the most current science, his fascination with Time as a kind of superficial overlay, and his greatest works: The Call of the Wild and White Fang, which were both to spring from this same period in his career and were born out of his experiences in Alaska and Canada during the Klondike Gold Rush.

In one sense it falls into the pretty campy classic sci-fi latter to appear in Amazing Stories and Analog, in which quasi-scientific theories were tested in the medium of literature. In A Relic of the Pliocene London writes from the perspective of a lone prospector in the night sitting by the fire with his dogs, who is startled by a burly wanderer of the northern wastes, a certain Thomas Stevens, who bogarts half of his tobacco right off the bat and then begins spinning a tall tale to explain the origin of his astounding muclucs [arctic moccasins], which he claims are of mammoth skin. The tall tale features the extinction of the world’s newest animal species—pups just born to Stevens’ ‘wolf-bread malamute bitch’—under the blundering feet of a time-travelling mammoth, as well as the extinction of the oldest surviving animal species, in the form of the last mammoth, by an enraged Stevens.

London holds the reader with this thin story via the intensity of the description of the actual hunting of the giant mammoth by a man armed only with a hand axe. The listener, even though he avows that he takes no responsibility for the veracity of the tale told by this man named Thomas Stevens, claims that the old wilderness hand made a gift to him of the muclucs and that they reside at the Smithsonian Institute.

I did not much care for this story, but it is of great interest as a mutual point of departure for London as an author; showing the way to his fabulously successful adventure writing set in the arctic, as well as his equally long-lived science fiction. A Relic of the Pliocene seems to me the jumping off point for London as a novelist and writer of impact.