(Not long ago, A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing over 75 vintage science fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number eight.)
If the ability to entertain contradictory notions at the same time is a quality of genius, H.G. Wells possessed a particularly rare strand of genius. He trafficked in grand-scale notions that housed equally grand contradictions. A socialist who optimistically felt the world might someday be saved the implementation of a benevolent world state, in The Time Machine, Wells summoned up a grim future that saw the human race devolving into two directions at once: one useless, the other vicious, both hopelessly stupid. The self-made son of a shopkeeper/cricketer, Wells' liberalism nonetheless allowed him to enthuse about eugenics, particularly the notion that the human race would be improved if its nastier members were simply not allowed to reproduce. (Hey, it was the Late-Victorian era. Everybody was doing it.) He immersed himself in science and history and translated his studies into visions of the future that alternated promises of utopia with warnings of disaster. He was, in many respects, exactly the right man to map out the promises and threats of the young 20th century.
Published after more famous books like The Invisible Man and War Of The Worlds, The Food Of The Gods (a.k.a. The Food Of The Gods And How It Came To Earth) has its share of contradictions as well. It begins as a comic send-up of science with a pair of researchers unveiling Herakleophorbia IV, a chemical compound that allows living things to develop steadily rather than in fits and starts. The result: Giant plants and animals. Why develop such a thing? Because, it would seem, they can. (Or, to borrow a line from Patton Oswalt, "We're science: We're all about 'coulda' not 'shoulda.'") They test the formula on an experimental farm supervised by a character named Skinner whose unreadably rendered lisping dialect ("Thir! I 'aven't the 'eart to argue with you. Thwelp me, Thir!") makes it easy to hope he won't make it through too many chapters.
He doesn't, thanks to, you guessed it, giant animals. Who'd have thought that would ever backfire? Food is today one of Wells' lesser-read efforts, but it's the secret source of every giant-animals-on-the-rampage story to come, from King Kong on up. But all that's more or less taken care in the early chapters. The book's final two thirds deal with the effects of Herakleophorbia IV on the human children who grew up consuming it. And grew, and grew.