The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth

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General Books LLC, 2010 - Fiction - 76 pages
Excerpt: ... little boy. One could see, even before he mentioned it, that he had gone to an ivy-clad public school in its anecdotage, with magnificent traditions, aristocratic associations, and no chemical laboratories, and proceeded thence to a venerable college in the very ripest Gothic. Few books he had younger than a thousand years; of these, Yarrow and Ellis and good pre-Methodist sermons made the bulk. He was a man of moderate height, a little shortened in appearance by his equatorial dimensions, and a face that had been mellow from the first was now climacterically ripe. The beard of a David hid his redundancy of chin; he wore no watch chain out of refinements and his modest clerical garments were made by a West End tailor.... And he sat with a hand on either shin, blinking at his village in beatific approval. He waved a plump palm towards it. His burthen sang out again. What more could any one desire? "We are fortunately situated," he said, putting the thing tamely. "We are in a fastness of the hills," he expanded. He explained himself at length. "We are out of it all." For they had been talking, he and his friend, of the Horrors of the Age, of Democracy, and Secular Education, and Sky Scrapers, and Motor Cars, and the American Invasion, the Scrappy Reading of the Public, and the disappearance of any Taste at all. "We are out of it all," he repeated, and even as he spoke the footsteps of some one coming smote upon his ear, and he rolled over and regarded her. You figure the old woman's steadfastly tremulous advance, the bundle clutched in her gnarled lank hand, her nose (which was her countenance) wrinkled with breathless resolution. You see the poppies nodding fatefully on her bonnet, and the dust-white spring-sided boots beneath her skimpy skirts, pointing with an irrevocable slow alternation east and west. Beneath her arm, a restive captive, waggled and slipped a scarcely valuable umbrella. What was there to tell the Vicar that this grotesque old...

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About the author (2010)

H.G. Wells was born in Bromley, England, the son of an unsuccessful merchant. After a limited education, he was apprenticed to a dry-goods merchant, but soon found he wanted something more out of life. He read widely and got a position as a student assistant in a secondary school, eventually winning a scholarship to the College of Science in South Kensington, where he studied biology under the British biologist and educator, Thomas Henry Huxley. After graduating, Wells took several different teaching positions and began writing for magazines. When his stories began to sell, he left teaching to write full time. Wells's first major novel, The Time Machine (1895), launched his career as a writer, and he began to produce a steady stream of science-fiction tales, short stories, realistic novels, and books of sociology, history, science, and biography, producing one or more books a year. Much of Wells's work is forward-looking, peering into the future of prophesy social and scientific developments, sometimes with amazing accuracy. Along with French writer Jules Verne, Wells is credited with popularizing science fiction, and such novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (1898) are still widely read. Many of Wells's stories are based on his own experiences. The History of Mr. Polly (1910) draws on the life of Wells's father. Kipps (1905) uses Wells's experience as an apprentice, and Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900) draws on Wells's experiences as a school teacher. Wells also wrote stories showing how the world could be a better place. One such story is A Modern Utopia (1905). As a writer, Wells's range was exceptionally wide and his imagination extremely fertile. While time may have caught up with him (many of the things he predicted have already come to pass), he remains an interesting writer because of his ability to tell a lively tale.

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