The Food of the Gods EPUB

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E.

Slosson called "H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time". With this book Mr. H. G. Wells has added another to the lengthening series of his ingenious fantasies of mingled romance and scientific forecast.

He calls it 'The Food of the Gods,' and bases it upon the chemical preparation of a food-product that produces gigantic growth in every organism to which it is administered.

When this product finds its way out of the laboratories of the inventors, startling consequences are entailed.

To begin with, it produces gigantic chickens and rats and wasps, to say nothing of dangerous rank growths of vegetation.

But its real mission is to produce a gigantic race of men and women; and when a certain number of these creatures have been raised upon it, and grown to their mature stature of forty feet or thereabouts, civilization has to face a serious menace.

These creatures are Uebermenschen in a more literal sense than that of which Nietzsche dreamed; and as soon as they become conscious of their power, they have things pretty much their own way.

The Food (properly call Boomfood) once started on its revolutionizing mission, all attempts to suppress it prove futile, and in the end there seems to be no outlook but extermination for ordinary old-fashioned mortals.

It is a big conception, developed with much ingenuity of detail; yet, with all his imagination, the author has only touched upon its possibilities here and there.

There is not a little humor of the dry, satirical kind in the book, and here the author is at his best; when he seeks to be magniloquent he achieves only bathos.