"Yes, but think of the dead!"
Another voice took up the strain. "The dead," it said. "Think of the unborn…"
Or:
"Whatever it dislocates," said Redwood, "My little boy must have the food."
Those are both from H.G. Wells’s excellent and far ahead of its time, The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth. The novella concerns a new tool of genetic engineering that makes people thirty-five feet tall, and of course occasions social conflict. Well’s short fiction is in general much underrated.
Really? I’ve heard its crap, at least The Time Machine, though I haven’t read any. Then again, you praise Lost and Stockhausen, so you’re not exactly artistically infallible.
Just an FYI, you can download a number of Wells novels and short stories from http://www.gutenberg.org It is a great resource for books in the public domain, I read a lot of Alexandre Dumas novels from this source. I’m not sure if it will keep the URL in the message, so I made my URL the main page.
I have no official connection to this org beyond using the site, and contributing some proof-reading.
The food of the gods was beer and honey
Mead, not beer.
This is the result when The Food of the Gods gets distilled down to the bare essentials:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy40TT_i7us
The Time Machine is a pretty good book. And unless I completely misread could be construed as a critique of socialism in the completely dependent society it creates.
How underrated can Wells be?
1. He’s dead, but still read.
2. Most people have heard of both him and either War of the Worlds (for the movie, sure, but…) or Time Machine.
Reminds me of sports commentary such as: “He’s the most underrated Pro Bowl lineman in the AFC.”
Yes, Shane, you did completely misread Time Machine.
Wells is, if anything, overrated. He ranks in the lower end of “serious fiction” while Verne, who was a much more accurate prognosticator, lands in the juvenile fiction category.
I bought a book of Wells’s stories for my son to read when he was 9 (complaint was that he wasn’t reading enough). I quickly found out that Well’s vocabulary was way too sophisticated for my son. Upshot was that I read the stories and was impressed with just how good they are.
In the novel “The Time Machine”, Wells’s protagonist explains in a stunningly clear way how time is a fourth dimension, ten years before Einstein’s 1905 paper introducing Special Relativity.
Szilard acknowledged that he got his idea for a chain reaction in 1933 from reading “The World Set Free”, written by Wells in 1914 . In this book Wells, explicitly mentioning an “atomic bomb”, describes artificial radioactivity as being mastered in … 1933!
In 1939 Szilard drafted a letter that his friend Einstein sent to Roosevelt and which started the Manhattan Project.
By the way, Wells didn’t go to Cambridge or Oxford but was a draper’s apprentice…
Impressive,eh?
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