The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth
1904
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth
1904
Two Victorian scientists accidentally create the Food of the Gods, a substance that makes living things grow to impossible sizes. Their chickens become monsters. Their rats become kaiju. And when they secretly feed it to children, those children grow into giants, beautiful, brilliant, and utterly terrifying to a world that fears what it has made. H.G. Wells wrote this in 1904 as a "fantasia on the change of scale in human affairs," and reading it now feels like watching our own biotechnology anxieties unfold a century early. The giants aren't the monsters here; they are instead persecuted, shut out, and hunted by a society that created them and then couldn't live with what it had wrought. Wells combines the gleeful absurdity of giant insects rampaging through the English countryside with genuine social satire about fear of the other, the intolerance that greets the different, and science that runs way ahead of wisdom. This is Wells unchained: speculative, funny, and quietly horrified by his own imagination.
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“We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?””
— H. G. Wells
“It is not that we would oust the little people from the world,' he said, 'in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards from their littleness, may hold their world forever. It is the step we fight for an not ourselves... We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves - for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the world... This earth is no resting place... We fight not for ourselves but for growth - growth that goes on forever. Tomorrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for ever more. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater,' he said, speaking with slow deliberation, 'greater, my Brothers! And then - still greater. To grow, and again - to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God. Growing... Till the earth is no more than a footstool... Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothingness, and spread...' He swung his arm heavenward: - 'There!””
— H. G. Wells
“The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.””
— H. G. Wells
“Now what sort of books will he need? There is his imagination to be fed. That, after all, is the crown of every education. The crown - as sound habits of mind and conduct are the throne. No imagination at all is brutality; a base imagination is lust and cowardice; but a noble imagination is God walking the earth again.””
— H. G. Wells
“scientists" as a class all the world over. What there is great of them is an annoyance to their fellow scientists and a mystery to the general public, and what is not is evident. There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have such obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To witness some queer, shy, misshapen, grey-headed, self-important, little discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of his fellow-men, or to read the anguish of Nature at the "neglect of science" when the angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Society by, or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on the work of another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one to realise the unfaltering littleness of men.””
— H. G. Wells
“What right have parents to say, my child shall have no light but the light I have had, shall grow no greater than the greatness to which I have grown?””
— H. G. Wells
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Wells, H. G.. The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-food-of-the-gods-and-how-it-came-to-earth-d272a5c2-0c95-46d2-b008-7aa14eedfa02.Wells, H. G. (1904). The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-food-of-the-gods-and-how-it-came-to-earth-d272a5c2-0c95-46d2-b008-7aa14eedfa02Wells, H. G.. The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-food-of-the-gods-and-how-it-came-to-earth-d272a5c2-0c95-46d2-b008-7aa14eedfa02.
