Most helpful customer reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Prescient, Mar 20 2004
By A Customer
>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.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
3 and 1/2 Stars, Oct 17 2002
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.
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