The Food of the Gods

Book 150: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics; Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

What harm could there be in a little scientific experiment that might have some practical benefits?

That's what Professor Redwood and Mr. Bensington thought when they first invented the “food of the gods.” But how could they have foreseen that their new scientific wonder would escape their control? That rats would grow big enough to attack and kill horses, or that gigantic leeches, plants, and cockroaches would threaten human life?

How could they have known that their food would be stolen and fed to human babies, engendering a new race of giants that might one day smash the puny, pygmy world of men?

Release date: January 1, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

INTRODUCTION

The Food of the Gods has been regarded by some as a minor addition to the canon of Wellsian science fiction. I’ve never understood why, for it seems to me to rank with the very best of his writing. Bensington and Redwood, Wells’ existentially myopic scientists, create ‘Herakleophorbia’, or ‘Boomfood’, a dietary stimulant that provokes giganticism in the creatures that eat it. But the substance escapes into the environment, and the south-east of England is plagued by waves of giant vegetation, wasps, rats and other beasts, including eventually giant human beings. Wells’ account of these events perhaps lacks some of the narrative drive and plangent, tragically-tinged seriousness of The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine. But it contains a superb central conceit, some gripping set-pieces, and most of all it has the memorable and eloquent imagination-haunting quality of the best SF. Perhaps this is more of a personal crotchet than I am admitting; for I have always found giants fascinating, have written giants into my own fiction, and respond to this novel precisely because it does giants so very well.

Of course, Wells was not the first writer to cover that topic. Giants have been part of fairy tales for millennia; and giants play important roles in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) – two great fantasy novels with which The Food of the Gods is in obvious dialogue. But Wells is doing something new. Swift’s aim was, broadly, satirical; and his Brobdignagian giants and Lilliputian miniatures are in part about dramatizing a sense of proportion, man’s proper place in the cosmos. Alice eats a prototype ‘boomfood’ (her magical mushroom) and grows prodigiously, thereby giving Carroll, appropriately for a masterpiece of children’s literature, a metaphor for childhood – that time of life when we literally experience abrupt shootings-up in height. But Wells is doing something else with his central metaphor, besides (that is) using it as a platform for both exciting action and social comedy.

To put it more precisely, Wells’ short novel does something neither Swift nor Carroll manage: it follows through on its concept. Swifts’ giants simply are, a fixed part of his imagined global landscape. Carroll’s Alice experiences childhood’s shifts in scale, but she herself doesn’t grow up – who would want to leave so wonderful a land as hers behind anyway? But growing up is precisely the theme of The Food of the Gods, what the book is about not just in the individual sense, but in the larger, social sense that Wells anticipated the coming of a proper maturity of humanity. The young giants at the novel’s end are one version of his ‘coming race’, a frequent feature of his speculative writing: the Samurai or Overmen who, he hoped, would move mankind as a species out of its bickering infant-stage into the broad sunlit uplands of his imagined Utopian future. To put it another way: if the Alice books are about the childhood of one girl, then Wells’ novel is about the childhood of society as a whole.

This is why the book is structured the way it is, and why so much of it is given over to a slightly bantering comedy-of-classmanners that has, I suppose, not aged particularly well. To be clear: I’d still stand up for some of the comedy in the book (the sections about baby Redwood breaking his playroom, having to be wheeled around in a reinforced invalid chair rather than a pram, and booming ‘ ‘‘Dadda’’ and ‘‘Babba’’ ’ at busdrivers and policemen ‘in a sociable democratic way’ still make me laugh, for instance). But for much of the book Wells’ deliberately Dickensian tone, if sometimes droll, is often rather clunkingly. Readers who associate Wells with the more lyrically evocative style of (say) The War of the Worlds may find this an impediment to their enjoyment. But it is not gratuitous. On the contrary, the style is integral to Wells’ larger project.

This is because the novel is about a world’s transition from small to big, from triviality to greatness. The first portion accordingly not only fills us in on Wells’ pseudo-scientific ‘food’, it also paints a portrait of society as a bumbling, incompetently childish world. The littleness of this vision of England parlays naturally into comedy. Even the more able of Wells’ adults engage in childish knockabout – clambering down holes, falling into ponds – and his scientists are as messy with their ‘boomfood’ as any toddler. To begin with there don’t seem to be any properly constituted authorities at all, nobody to take charge of the increasingly alarming situation. Even when ‘government’ gets involved, later on, it takes the form of the pettiness of Caterham, a kind of pigmy demagogue. By contrast, Wells draws the young human giants with a great deal of dignity, and even (by the end) a tonal grandeur compatible with their physical dimensions. Their stature is greater than ours in more than simply physical terms.

The crucial thing about these giants is that they are the future. Here’s Redwood, at the end, watching his giant son and their giant comrades preparing for War: ‘the two giants who were working in the corner began a rhythmic hammering that made a mighty music to the scene . . . about him were the young giants, huge and beautiful, glittering in their mail.’ By this stage, this Wagnerian tone has entirely replaced the drollery of the earlier sections:

The voice of the giant children spoke to one another, an undertone to that clangorous melody of the smiths. His tide of doubt ebbed. He heard the giant voices, he heard their movements about him still. It was real, more surely it was real – as real as spiteful acts! More real, for these great things, it may be, are the coming things, and the littleness, bestiality, and infirmity of men are the things that go.

That fence-sitting ‘it may be’ aside, this encapsulates the moral of the book; and this is why Wells chooses to tell this story via giants. It is not just that their great size correlates to the ‘greatness’ he anticipates as replacing humanity’s littleness, bestiality, and infirmity – although, obviously, it does. But it is something more. Wells’ giants are unmissable. They are the very obviousness of the positions that seemed to Wells himself perfectly clear and inevitable, despite the fact that most of his contemporaries couldn’t see them: the passing away of the petty old world and the coming of new greatness. This is why his giants, unschooled outsiders though they be, light as-it-were naturally upon progressive ideological positions identical with Wells’ own – young giant Caddles asking with seeming ingenuity why the idle rich have all the money and the poor have to do all the work, for instance; or young Redwood and the giant princess together repudiating (as Wells himself did, in his private life) the restrictions of Edwardian conventional sexual morality. His giants are the enormous truth of things that little people contrive, somehow, to overlook; they are, to employ a cliché, the elephant in the room. They, like the novel in which they appear, are not to be missed.

Adam Roberts

BOOK ONE

THE DAWN OF THE FOOD

CHAPTER THE FIRSTThe Discovery of the Food

1

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who, though they dislike it extremely, are very properly called ‘Scientists’. They dislike that word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were – that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country. But the Great Public and its Press know better, and ‘Scientists’ they are, and when they emerge to any sort of publicity, ‘distinguished scientists’ and ‘eminent scientists’ and ‘well-known scientists’ is the very least we call them.

Certainly both Mr Bensington and Professor Redwood quite merited any of these terms long before they came upon the marvellous discovery of which this story tells. Mr Bensington was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a former president of the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood was Professor of Physiology in the Bond Street College of the London University and had been grossly libelled by the anti-vivisectionists time after time. And both had led lives of academic distinction from their very earliest youth.

They were of course quite undistinguished-looking men, as indeed all true Scientists are. There is more personal distinction about the mildest-mannered actor alive than there is about the entire Royal Society. Mr Bensington was short and very, very bald, and he stooped slightly; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots that were abundantly cut open because of his numerous corns, and Professor Redwood was entirely ordinary in his appearance. Until they happened upon the Food of the Gods (as I must insist upon calling it) they led lives of such eminent and studious obscurity that it is hard to find anything whatever to tell the reader about them.

Mr Bensington won his spurs (if one may use such an expression of a gentleman in boots of slashed cloth) by his splendid researches upon the More Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor Redwood rose to eminence – I do not clearly remember how he rose to eminence. I know he was very eminent, and that’s all. But I fancy it was a voluminous work on Reaction Times with numerous plates of sphygmograph tracings (I write subject to correction) and an admirable new terminology that did the thing for him.

The general public saw little or nothing of either of these gentlemen. Sometimes at such places as the Royal Institution and the Society of Arts it did in a sort of way see Mr Bensington, or at least his blushing baldness and something of his collar and coat, and hear fragments of a lecture or paper that he imagined himself to be reading audibly; and once I remember – one midday in the vanished past – when the British Association was at Dover, coming on Section C or D or some such letter, which had taken up its quarters in a public-house, and following, out of mere curiosity, two serious-looking ladies with paper parcels through a door labelled ‘Billiards’ and ‘Pool’ into a scandalous darkness, broken only by a magic-lantern circle of Redwood’s tracings.

I watched the lantern slides come and go, and listened to a voice (I forget what it was saying) which I believe was the voice of Professor Redwood, and there was a sizzling from the lantern and another sound that kept me there, still out of curiosity, until the lights were unexpectedly turned up. And then I perceived that this sound was the sound of the munching of buns and sandwiches and things that the assembled British Associates had come there to eat under cover of the magic-lantern darkness.

And Redwood, I remember, went on talking all the time the lights were up and dabbing at the place where his diagram ought to have been visible on the screen – and so it was again so soon as the darkness was restored. I remember him then as a most ordinary, slightly nervous-looking dark man, with an air of being preoccupied with something else and doing what he was doing just then under an unaccountable sense of duty.

I heard Bensington also once – in the old days – at an educational conference in Bloomsbury. Like most eminent chemists and botanists, Mr Bensington was very authoritative upon teaching – though I am certain he would have been scared out of his wits by an average Board School class in half-an-hour – and so far as I can remember now, he was propounding an improvement of Professor Armstrong’s Heuristic method, whereby at the cost of three or four hundred pounds’ worth of apparatus, a total neglect of all other studies and the undivided attention of a teacher of exceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar sort of thumby thoroughness acquire in the course of ten or twelve years almost as much chemistry as one could learn from one of those objectionable shilling text-books that were then so common at that date . . .

Quite ordinary persons you perceive, both of them, outside their science. Or if anything on the unpractical side of ordinary. And that you will find is the case with ‘scientists’ as a class all the world over. What there is great about 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 so far as their human intercourse goes, in a narrow world; 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 an 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.

And withal the reef of science that these little ‘scientists’ built and are yet building is so wonderful, so portentous, so full of mysterious half-shapen promises for the mighty future of man! They do not seem to realise the things they are doing. No doubt long ago even Mr Bensington, when he chose this calling, when he consecrated his life to the alkaloids and their kindred compounds had some inkling of the vision – more than an inkling. Without some great inspiration, for such glories and positions only as a ‘scientist’ may expect, what young man would have given his life to this work, as young men do? No, they must have seen the glory, they must have had the vision, but so near that it has blinded them. The splendour has blinded them, mercifully, so that for the rest of their lives they can hold the light of knowledge in comfort – that we may see.

And perhaps it accounts for Redwood’s touch of preoccupation, that – there can be no doubt of it now – he among his fellows was different; he was different inasmuch as something of the vision still lingered in his eyes.

2

The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that Mr Bensington and Professor Redwood made between them; and having regard now to what it has already done and all that it is certainly going to do, there is surely no exaggeration in the name. But Mr Bensington would no more have called it by that name in cold blood than he would have gone out from his flat in Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a wreath of laurel. The phrase was a mere first cry of astonishment from him. He called it the Food of the Gods in his enthusiasm, and for an hour or so at the most altogether. After that he decided he was being absurd. When he first thought of the thing he saw, as it were, a vista of enormous possibilities – literally enormous possibilities, but upon this dazzling vista, after one stare of amazement, he resolutely shut his eyes even as a conscientious ‘scientist’ should. After that, the Food of the Gods sounded blatant to the pitch of indecency. He was surprised he had used the expression. Yet for all that something of that clear-eyed moment hung about him and broke out ever and again . . .

‘Really, you know,’ he said, rubbing his hands together and laughing nervously, ‘it has more than a theoretical interest.

‘For example,’ he confided, bringing his face close to the Professor’s and dropping to an undertone, ‘it would perhaps, if suitably handled, sell. . .

‘Precisely,’ he said, walking away – ‘as a Food. Or at least a food ingredient.

‘Assuming of course that it is palatable. A thing we cannot know till we have prepared it.’

He turned upon the hearthrug, and studied the carefully designed slits upon his cloth shoes.

‘Name?’ he said, looking up in response to an inquiry. ‘For my part I incline to the good old classical allusion. It – it makes Science res— Gives it a touch of old-fashioned dignity. I have been thinking . . . I don’t know if you will think it absurd of me . . . A little fancy is surely occasionally permissible . . . Herakleophorbia. Eh? The nutrition of a possible Hercules? You know it might . . .

‘Of course if you think not—’

Redwood reflected with his eyes on the fire and made no objection.

‘You think it would do?’

Redwood moved his head gravely.

‘It might be Titanophorbia, you know. Food of Titans . . . You prefer the former?

‘You’re quite sure you don’t think it a little too—’

‘No.’

‘Ah! I’m glad.’

And so they called it Herakleophorbia throughout their investigations, and in their report – the report that was never published, because of the unexpected developments that upset all their arrangements, it is invariably written in that way. There were three kindred substances prepared before they hit on the one their speculations had foretold, and these they spoke of as Herakleophorbia I, Herakleophorbia II, and Herakleophorbia III. It is Herakleophorbia IV which I – insisting upon Bensington’s original name – call here the Food of the Gods.

3

The idea was Mr Bensington’s. But as it was suggested to him by one of Professor Redwood’s contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, he very properly consulted that gentleman before he carried it further. Besides which it was, as a research, a physiological quite as much as a chemical inquiry.

Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted to tracings and curves. You are familiar – if you are at all the sort of reader I like – with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paper you cannot make head nor tail of, and at the end come five or six long folded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called ‘smoothed curves’ set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissæ – and things like that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the suspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the author does not understand it either. But really you know many of these scientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well, it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.

I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. And after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything will be as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves and sphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growth that really gave Mr Bensington his idea.

Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts, kittens, puppies, sunflowers, mushrooms, bean plants and (until his wife put a stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth went on, not at a regular pace, or, as he put it, so:



but with bursts and intermissions of this sort,



and that apparently nothing grew regularly and steadily, and so far as he could make out nothing could grow regularly and steadily; it was as if every living thing had first to accumulate force to grow, grew with vigour only for a time and then had to wait for a space before it could go on growing again. And in the muffled and highly technical language of the really careful ‘scientist’, Redwood suggested that the process of growth probably demanded the presence of a considerable quantity of some necessary substance in the blood that was only formed very slowly, and that when this substance was used up by growth, it was only very slowly replaced, and that meanwhile the organism had to mark time. He compared his unknown substance to oil in machinery. A growing animal was rather like an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and must then be oiled before it can run again. (‘But why shouldn’t one oil the engine from without?’ said Mr Bensington, when he read the paper.) And all this, said Redwood, with the delightful nervous inconsecutiveness of his class, might very probably be found to throw a light upon the mystery of certain of the ductless glands. As though they had anything to do with it at all!

In a subsequent communication Redwood went further. He gave a perfect Brock’s benefit of diagrams – exactly like rocket trajectories they were, and the gist of it – so far as it had any gist – was the blood of puppies and kittens and the sap of sunflowers and the juice of mushrooms in what he called the ‘growing phase’ differed as to the proportions of certain elements from their blood and sap on the days when they were not particularly growing.

And when Mr Bensington, after holding the diagrams sideways and upside down, began to see what this difference was, a great amazement came upon him. Because, you see, the difference might probably be due to the presence of just the very substance he had recently been trying to isolate in his researches upon such alkaloids as are most stimulating to the nervous system. He put down Redwood’s paper on the patent reading-desk that swung inconveniently from his armchair, took off his gold-rimmed spectacles, breathed on them and wiped them very carefully.

‘By Jove!’ said Mr Bensington.

Then replacing his spectacles again he turned to the patent reading-desk, which immedi. . .