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Is This the Book That Inspired "Flowers for Algernon" and the movie "Charlie"? Some sf historians think so. Here is the classic story of a main raised from subnormal to superman overnight! At first he plans to benefit human kind. But when the transformation proves temporary, he wonders if he should save humanity or expunge it from the face of the Earth. Seeds of Life is science fiction tragedy on the level of grand opera. It is also an enthralling hard science story with a very human heart, mixing such unlikely ingredients as a black widow spider, a two-million volt X-ray tube, chicken eggs which hatch out reptilian monsters, and other equally strange plot threads. When Dr. Andrew Crane of the Erickson Foundation tries to make a man of Neils Bork, his laboratory assistant, whose interest in bottled inspiration is his chief weakness, he succeeds in a spectacular manner. Bork himself contributes to the end result in his own drunken way, and there emerges Miguel De Soto, a superman in every sense of the word. His rate of thinking and perceiving has accelerated many thousand times beyond that of any human being who has ever lived. He is a partial, accidental anticipation of what humanity will become in the millenniums ahead. Seeds of Life is science fiction of a high order, a novel involving believable people in unusual situations, written in the smoothly entertaining style which characterized all of John Taine's novels. No wonder Analog magazine (then Astounding) hailed the first edition of Seeds of Life as "top notch Taine" and praised the author for his "unique, memorable science mysteries, full of outrageously daring flights of the scientific imagination." Analog critic P. Schuyler Miller wrote that "As in most of his books the theme is biological--the sources of life, and of the forces which mold life. An accident remakes the blundering alcoholic technician Neils Bork, into the mutant superman, Miguel de Soto, and at the same time sets in motion other processes which attract the attention of Bork's employer, Andrew Crane, and the very competent Dr. Brown. "the author keeps several mysteries at the boiling point--what has happened to Bork, to the black widow spider, to Bertha the hen; what is the theory of evolution and devolution around which the whole book is built." John Taine (1883-1960) was Eric Temple Bell, Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His sf novels were based on cutting edge science and experiments he learned first-hand from his the top scientists of his day. As Taine he was the author The Forbidden Garden, The Greatest Adventure, The Time Stream, The Iron Star, and other Golden Age sf classics.
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