Chickens as big as horses The British novelist H.G. Wells did
not like to have his science fiction novels likened to those of
the French writer Jules Verne, but there are some similarities.
And even more than Verne’s pieces, the work of Wells more than a
century ago often contains weird echoes of much more recent
events. One of his stories is about a machine of war that
startlingly resembles the tank that was developed during World
War I, though Wells wrote about it more than a decade before the
start of that conflict. A novel entitled “The Food of the Gods”
has some things that sound even more recent. A chemist named
Bensington teams up with a professor named Redwood whose
specialty is growth of animals and plants. Redwood has
determined that growth comes in spurts, with periods of inaction
coming in between while the individual accumulates a new supply
of whatever it is that causes growth. Bensington finds that he
may have hit upon a substance that would obviate those periods
of inaction. Bensington, though