If one author has had the most
profound influence on me throughout my life, it has to be H.G. Wells, who I
started reading at 12 or 13. Although I
like a lot of science-fiction, it wasn’t imaginings of the future that I
responded to in Wells; it was his darkly ironic view of humanity; a strange
combination of misanthropy and hope; represented most potently in his depiction
of the Eloi and the Morlocks in The Time
Machine; humans evolved and devolved along two opposite paths; one gentle
and beautiful but devoid of intelligence and will, and the other a race of
subterranean, cannibalistic Neanderthals.
Wells was much more than a would-be prophet of fantastic contraptions
that might appear in coming decades – (that’s how he’s usually portrayed; always
coupled with Jules Verne); he was also a historian, a satirist, a social
activist and most importantly a brilliant, poetic writer. The most striking thing about Wells for me is
the issue of perspective. In novel after
novel he forces us to question what right we have to claim superiority over any
other species and what really differentiates us as human beings. The War
of the Worlds has humans reduced to livestock for an invading, technologically
superior race. The Island of Dr. Moreau presents humans as perfectly capable of
being spliced with animals to create whatever freakish new beasts a mad
scientist can imagine. When the Sleeper Wakes depicts a massive
revolution against an oppressive regime, only to have the new rulers prove just
as corrupt as those they replaced. Time
and again, tampering and tweaking the human experiment results in horror,
failure or completely unforeseen results.
Such is the case in The Food of
the Gods, where two entrepreneurial scientists – Bensington and Redwood – develop
a substance called Herakleophorbia that makes any life forms that consume it grow
to many times their normal size. The men
have little vision about possible consequences and thoughtlessly justify any
and all outcomes as destiny. Like Dr.
Moreau before them, they believe that anything science can do it should do;
even though evolution and society may be radically altered overnight. At first, “boomfood,” as it’s known in the press,
causes isolated incidents of oversized ants, wasps, creeping vines and (most
frighteningly) rats, but it is only as several children who are fed the food begin
to mature over the years that the issue of bigness becomes a political crisis,
leading to the rise in power of a demagogue who makes getting rid of the giants
his pet cause. The grown giants,
meanwhile, are unable to relate to the “pigmies” scampering at their feet. “What do you little people do with
yourselves?” one asks upon seeing crowded London for the first time. The provincial prejudice of the small humans,
and their impotence against the giants, heralds the violent transition from one
era to another, as the idealistic young giants imagine shaping a new world and
even conquering the stars.
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