The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth was published by Macmillan in September 1904 and is Wells at his most exuberantly allegorical. Two scientists — Bensington and Redwood — develop Herakleophorbia, a substance that causes anything that consumes it to grow to enormous size. The substance escapes the laboratory: giant wasps, giant rats, giant chickens terrorize the countryside. But the real crisis comes when human children are fed the substance and grow into forty-foot giants — intelligent, peaceful, and thoroughly unwanted by a terrified normal-sized humanity.
The Novel
The novel divides into three movements. The first is comic catastrophe: the food escapes, nature runs wild, and Wells has great fun with the absurdity of giant insects attacking English villages. The second is social satire: the establishment — politicians, clergy, the press — responds to the giants with hysteria, demanding their containment or destruction. The third is tragic confrontation: the giants, who have done nothing wrong except exist, must decide whether to submit to a world that fears them or to fight for their right to live.
Wells’s sympathies are entirely with the giants, who represent the future: larger in body, in mind, and in moral vision than the small, frightened humanity that opposes them. The novel ends on the brink of war between the two species — a war the giants expect to win but that Wells leaves unresolved, preferring the dramatic tension of the threshold to the banality of resolution.
Themes
Progress vs. fear — the novel is an allegory about humanity’s ambivalent relationship with its own advancement. Every genuine innovation — scientific, social, cultural — threatens the existing order and provokes resistance.
Size as metaphor — the giants are not merely physically large but morally and intellectually large. “Small” humanity is literally small-minded: petty, fearful, conservative.
Science and democracy — Wells explores the tension between scientific progress (which is inherently elitist, driven by the exceptional) and democratic society (which distrusts the exceptional and demands conformity).
Collecting The Food of the Gods
First edition (Macmillan and Co., London, 1904): Blue cloth binding with gilt lettering. No dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine copies: $1,500–$4,000
- Very good: $500–$1,500
- Good: $200–$500
First American edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1904): Published simultaneously. $500–$1,500.
The novel was adapted (loosely) by Bert I. Gordon in 1976 as a B-movie, and its central premise has been recycled endlessly in science fiction and horror. As a collecting item, it benefits from being both a Wells first edition and an early example of the “science gone wrong” narrative.