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Two scientists, the clumsy Mr Bensington and the pompous Professor Redwood, invent a substance, Herakleophorbia, that makes living things grow to giant size…
Two scientists, the clumsy Mr Bensington and the pompous Professor Redwood, invent a substance, Herakleophorbia, that makes living things grow to giant size. Carelessly handled at an experimental farm, it produces chickens as big as ostriches, enormous wasps and rats, and then children who grow forty feet tall. As the giant children grow up, the ordinary world fears and persecutes them, and a struggle begins between the old, small humanity and the new.
Context and significance
H. G. Wells published the novel in 1904, a fable about scientific progress and the fear of change, and it was loosely filmed in 1976. Read The Time Machine and The War in the Air.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.
He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.