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Title: The Food Of The Gods by H. G. Wells ISBN: 1-57002-015-9 Publisher: University Publishing House, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 February, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (6 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Prescient
Comment: >Of course people have gotten bigger in the 20th century, due primarily to better nutrition, health care, excercise, etc., but we are hardly the 40 foot giants Wells' talks about.

Look up "nutrition" in a dictionary: It means "food". In particular people have gotten RADICALLY taller in the last fifteen years of the twentieth-century--a remarkably short span of time--due to what's being put INTO food (chemicals--I'm not talking about vitamins here): not "bigger", TALLER. Taller, thinner, less muscular, more stretched out, in a word, misshapen, disfigured.

This book can be taken as a parable or an adventure story, and so on, but to a remarkable extent it happens to be a DEAD-ON prophecy.

Rating: 4
Summary: Throught provoking
Comment: The novel is one of the lesser known ones by Wells. It is about the discovery of a food that makes living creatures grow to a size that's many times larger than normal. The "food" is spread from its laboratory context and escapes into the countryside. After a number of years, this gigantism is a part of life in England with a number of people being on the food from birth.

The book does not focus on the scientific side of it at all, except in the first few chapters. Most of the rhetoric is about society and it's lack of acceptance of the giants. They just don't fit in with, say, the "proper" notion of life in an English village where ignorance and hypocricy rule. As a result, there is a much-provoked retaliation by the giants.

At its finest, the book describes the giants as symbolic of a new, grand mentality as opposed to the pettiness of the general populace. As such (especially as it uses the literal difference of size to symbolise more profound things) The Food of the Gods is in the tradition of satires such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. In fact, one of the giants is given the nickname Pantagruel as a child. The book highlights intolerance and hatred as the line of distinction between ordinary people and giants is drawn across communities and families.

The novel is entertaining and inspiring. Wells is known for his grandiose visions of society's potential and this book is a great example. He inspires a revolution - but not an economic or violent one - but something that's in the next step in the evolution of ideas. Read this book!

Rating: 3
Summary: 3 and 1/2 Stars
Comment: Everyone knows that H.G. Wells has written some great books that are classics not only of speculative fiction, but of literature itself. However, as anyone who has delved deeper into his canon knows, he also wrote many books of far lesser quality. This book starts out quite slowly and awkwardly, and, at first, I thought it was going to be one of those books; but, as I got deeper into the book, it became more interesting and fascinating. Wells's prose style, merely fuctionary at the best of times, is particularly awkward and trying at the start of this book. It does, however, improve much as the story goes on. Even if you find this book slow going at first, my advice to you is to stick with it: the last 50 pages or so are classic Wells, and find him at his most poetic and striking. This book finds Wells in the mode of social commentary that he tended to feature in his novels after the turn of the century; and, if his position on the issue presented in this book is not as abundantly clear as that in some of his other works, it nonetheless makes for fine reading. Not a first-class Wells novel by any means, and, though you should read a good handful of his books before beginning on this one, you will eventually want to pick this up if you are a fan of Wells.