Seeds of Life

by John Taine (Pseudonym), Eric Temple Bell

Did this book inspire "Flowers for Algernon" & the "Charlie" film? Some sf historians think so. It's a story of a man raised from subnormal to superman overnight! At 1st he plans to benefit humanity. But when the transformation proves temporary, he wonders if he should save humanity or expunge it. Seeds of Life is sf tragedy as grand opera. It's also an enthralling hard science story with a human heart, mixing such ingredients as a black widow spider, a 2,000,000 volt X-ray tube, chicken eggs hatching reptilian monsters & other strange plot threads. When Dr Andrew Crane of the Erickson Foundation tries to make a man of Neils Bork, his lab 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, & there emerges Miguel de Soto, a superman in every sense. His rate of thinking & perceiving has accelerated many times beyond that of any human. He's a partial, accidental anticipation of what humanity will become in the millenniums ahead. Seeds of Life is sf of a high order, a novel involving believable people in unusual situations, written in the smoothly entertaining style which characterized all of Taine's novels. No wonder Analog magazine (then Astounding) hailed the 1st edition of Seeds of Life as "top notch Taine" & praised the author for his "unique, memorable science mysteries, full of outrageously daring flights of the scientific imagination." Analog critic P. SchuylerMiller wrote that "As in most of his books the theme is biological--the sources of life, & of the forces which mold life. An accident remakes the blundering alcoholic technician Neils Bork, into the mutant superman, Miguel de Soto, & at the same time sets in motion other processes which attract the attention of Bork's employer, Andrew Crane, & the 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's the theory of evolution & devolution around which the whole book is built."
John Taine (1883-1960) was Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics professor at the California Inst. of Technology. His sf novels were based on cutting edge science & experiments he learned 1st-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 & other Golden Age sf classics.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

255 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1931

About the author

Eric Temple Bell (February 7, 1883, Peterhead, Scotland - December 21, 1960, Watsonville, California) was a mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the U.S. for most of his life. He published his non-fiction under his given name and his fiction as John Taine.

Reviews

[Warren Fournier · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you were at all worried about the effects of 5G networks, you'll be surprised to find that people were thinking of these things way back in the 1920s! This is one of the most insane yet sophisticated Radium-Age novels I've read in a long time, and I'm surprised more people don't discuss it.

We have multiple concepts wrapped into one. An electrical engineer is performing experiments on wireless electricity, and is transformed into a genius by alterations to his genetics by the short wavelengths of the radiation with which he is working. However, he also goes insane with his new-found enlightenment. Realizing the potential for wireless technology to mutate sex organs and germ cells, he sets about on a global experiment to rapidly change the course of human evolution by duping energy companies to implement his patents.

This novel gets some attention for being a prototype of "Flowers for Algernon," but as you can see, it is so much more than that. We have monsters and a Jekyll and Hyde motif mixed with speculative physics, genetics, and engineering. So much was thrown against the wall here, and most of it actually stuck. John Taine, aka mathematician Eric Temple Bell, really had a lot to say and says it. From a satire on corporate practices and peer-reviewed academia, to thoughtful analysis of the holes in Darwin's theories, to speculation about the potential impact of criss crossing the world with a network of "hard" radiation, this book will be hard to put down.

In fact, I would be so bold as to say it would be a masterpiece, but it was slightly marred by a (literal) phoned in ending that could have been much better if it had stopped a few pages earlier. Also, it was unclear where the sympathies of the characters lay most of the time. Taine paints the super genius as a flat out villain at times, but then the protagonists treat him with remarkable civility, even friendliness, and by the end we are supposed to have sympathy for him. The best villains are the ones that are more nuanced and tragic, and though Taine is going for that here, the character really is not likeable at all. So I didn't fall for the whole tragic antihero thing.

But as for the rest, wow! I do highly recommend "Seeds of Life" to science fiction fans, and look forward to reading more from this brilliant author.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 1956 sci-fi "B movie" "Indestructible Man," hardened criminal Butcher Benton, played by the always wonderful Lon Chaney, Jr., is put to death by the state, but is later revivified by a mad scientist using 300,000 volts of electricity. Benton becomes not only possessed of superhuman strength but is also, as events show, impervious to bullets. But if a certain novel of 25 years earlier can be believed, this was not the first time that a human being was subjected to a massive dose of juice, and with astonishing results. The book in question was Scottish-American author John Taine's ninth novel, "Seeds of Life," which features not only one scientist suffering from the side effects of a 2 million-volt exposure, but another who is changed radically in consequence of a 20 million-volt jolt! But more on this in a moment.

"Seeds of Life" made its initial appearance in the Fall 1931 issue of the 50-cent pulp magazine "Amazing Stories Quarterly." For those 50 cents, readers got not only Taine's complete novel, but also four short stories, two poems and a novelette by various others, in addition to interior artwork by H. W. Wesso for the Taine contribution. Quite a deal for half a buck, even in the depths of the Great Depression! Another 20 years would go by before "Seeds of Life" was reprinted as a hardcover book; this 1951 edition, a $2.75 bargain from Fantasy Press, featured a beautiful cover on its dust jacket by Ric Binkley and remains something of a collector's item 70 years later. But the edition that I was fortunate enough to acquire was the 1966 paperback from Dover, which gives us "Seeds of Life" as well as John Taine's seventh novel, 1930's "White Lily," complete in one volume. Whereas "White Lily" is set pretty much exclusively in the isolated western region of China, and deals with crystalline life-forms that are making things very tough for us carbon-based critters here on Earth, "Seeds of Life" is set in the more familiar Seattle, and has as its concerns the unintended creation of a superman, manipulated evolution and devolution, and the business war between two major scientific groups. Happily, it is still another winner from the pen of John Taine.

Taine's novel introduces us to electrical engineer Andrew Crane, a lanky, 27-year-old Texan who works at the Erickson Foundation for Electrical Research, in Seattle. When we first encounter him, he and his assistant, the alcoholic and perpetually bungling Neils Bork, are lugging a delicate bit of equipment into his lab: a six-foot-long glass tube for Crane's new 2 million-volt X-ray device; a tube that Bork typically destroys by accident. Crane takes this setback with good grace, but the reader is soon made aware that Bork harbors a deep-seated grudge against his boss, a grudge so bitter that one night, in a drunken rage, he attempts to destroy not only Crane's experimental X-ray unit, but himself as well. But his vandalism/suicide attempt does not go quite as planned. Passing a full 20 million volts into an X-ray machine designed for only 2 million, Bork destroys the entire lab and is rendered unconscious. He awakens with no memory of his past, and with his physical features completely altered. Plus, as he soon learns, his mentality has evolved by millennia, and the erstwhile drunken blunderer is now capable of reading pages of copy at a glance, and of achieving miracles of scientific creation with little effort. With no memory of his Borkian identity, he renames himself Miguel De Soto and secures a position for himself at Erickson, where his new associates believe Bork to be deceased. De Soto quickly manages to make a fortune for the Erickson group, eventually becoming the company's director, and thus his old nemesis Crane's boss. The latter, for his part, instinctually distrusts his new supervisor, but has lots of other concerns to keep him busy. His skin, perhaps as a result of long-term X-ray exposure, has begun to itch like crazy, and the water in his bathtub turns a blood-red color when he exits it! Even worse, following the explosion in his lab, hundreds of dead black widow spiders are discovered strewn about it, each one four feet long! A toad that is brought into the rebuilt lab later turns into a six-foot giant; a hen that is exposed to De Soto's latest gizmo lays eggs that hatch to reveal prehistoric lizard monstrosities; and 19-year-old Alice Kent--the daughter of Erickson's previous director, who De Soto had infatuated and wed by dint of his newfound charm--becomes pregnant with something...not quite normal. And although De Soto's abilities initially bend themselves to the betterment of mankind, another lab accident results in the diminution of his mental powers, as well as incipient madness, and a plan to destroy the human race using as his cat's-paws Erickson and its primary competitor, and entailing the awesome utilization of cosmic rays to induce sterility...and devolution....

"Seeds of Life," in retrospect, fits in very neatly with Taine's other 15 novels, written during the period 1924 - '54, at least as regards its thematic concerns. The subject of the transmutation of elements, which De Soto is shown toying with, is supposedly at the heart of the author's third novel, "Quayle's Invention" ('27); the epic battles between two scientific corporations are dealt with in his fourth, "Green Fire" ('28); devolution had figured prominently in his sixth, "The Iron Star" ('30); while a hard look at prehistoric life had been a concern of his fifth, "The Greatest Adventure" ('29), and would later be the centerpiece of his next and tenth novel, "Before the Dawn" ('34). Strangely enough, the leading ladies in Dover's "White Lily" and "Seeds of Life" collection are both a mere 19 years of age, and both suffer tragic ends. The 1931 book's showcasing of an ordinary man who is made into a genius and then begins to lose his newfound abilities is said by some to have been an inspiration for Daniel Keyes' wonderfully touching sci-fi novel of 1959, "Flowers for Algernon," and by extension the 1968 film "Charly," although whether or not this is actually true, I cannot say.

John Taine, it should be remembered, was the pen name of the award-winning mathematician Eric Temple Bell, who wrote sci-fi as a sideline. Bell, by the way, also wrote numerous volumes in the field of mathematics, with such titles as "The Cyclotomic Quinary Quintic" (1912; OK, I confess that I have absolutely no idea what that book is about!), "An Arithmetical Theory of Certain Numerical Functions" (1915) and "Algebraic Arithmetic" (1927). And it seems to me that of the four Taine books that I have experienced so far, "Seeds of Life" is the one in which the love that Bell felt for his No. 1 vocation is most evident. Early on in the novel, as De Soto sits in a library reading at the rate of a page/second, we are given a glimpse as to just what fascinates Taine so much about math:

"...as he worked his lightning way steadily through modern higher algebra, analytic geometry, the calculus, and the theory of functions of real and complex variables, he began to become interested. Here at last was the simple, adequate language of nature herself. It was terse and luminously expressive in a highly suggestive way--unlike the ton or so of solid prose he had already digested against his will. What the italicized theorems left unsaid frequently expressed more than they purported to tell...."

But then, surprisingly, mathematician Bell shows De Soto becoming disillusioned:

"...Gradually a strange, new light dawned on him. This beautiful language after all was but another shovelful of unnecessary dust thrown up by clumsy workers between themselves and nature. Why go to all this fuss to torture and disguise the obvious? Why not look ahead, and in one swift glance see the beginning and the end of every laborious, unnecessary demonstration, as but different aspects of one self-evident truth? All these imposing regiments of equations and diagrams, that marched and countermarched endlessly through book after book, were merely the fickle mercenaries of men too indolent to win their own battles. By a conscious exercise of its innate power the mind, if only it let itself go, might perceive nature itself and not this pale allegory of halting symbols. Did the writers of scientific books need all these lumbering aids to direct comprehension?"

Thus thinks De Soto, the man with the cosmic ray-induced mentality of the far future. Whether or not they are indeed Bell's sentiments as well is anybody’s guess.

Taine, it strikes the reader, was one of the very few writers of science fiction of the 1920s and '30s to actually include hard science in his tales, and "Seeds of Life," dealing as it does with physics, biochemistry and evolution, is surely no exception. The author adds further scientific cachet to his novel by referencing such luminaries as English scientists Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday and Scottish scientists Peter Tait and James Clerk Maxwell, while numerous Biblical and Shakespearean quotes add an aura of decided literacy to the affair. Taine's prose is wonderfully readable--what the blurb on the Fantasy Press hardcover termed a "smoothly entertaining style"..."realistic, gripping and informative"--and demonstrates an especial facility with beautifully rendered, realistic dialogue. His ninth novel, released when the author was 48, is consistently fascinating and colorful, with a raft of well-drawn secondary characters and smartly paced thrills. Personally, I could not put this intelligent, truly adult piece of vintage sci-fi down.

And yet, inevitably, there are some problems, I felt. For one thing, Taine's story line keeps jumping backward and forward in time, a fact that tends to engender some slight confusion; perhaps this is why the "N.Y. Times"'s Basil Davenport complained, in his review of the Fantasy Press edition, of the book's "lack of a single clear narrative line." Adding to the confusion is the fact that De Soto's motivations keep changing; as his mentality flows and later ebbs, so too do his plans vis-à-vis humanity, the Erickson group, and even Alice. It's a little hard to keep track. And Taine, in an effort to maintain suspense, makes things deliberately obscure at times. When Crane and his good friend Dr. Brown discuss all the assorted conundrums in the book, Taine often pulls away, as if to say "Yes, our heroes know what's going on, but we'll clue all of you in later." It can sometimes feel like reader manipulation. But what perhaps bothered me most is that we are never given the big moments that we have been expecting and hoping for: when De Soto remembers his past life and when Crane realizes that the man he instinctively detests is none other than his old assistant Bork. Events toward the book's tragic finale indicate that De Soto had indeed remembered, but it would have been nice if we'd all been privy to that revelation. Still, these quibbles all pale into insignificance when stacked against the undeniable success that "Seeds of Life" undoubtedly is. Taine, who is now a very solid 4 for 4 with this reader, gives us, early on in his book, the image of Dr. Brown examining a drop of water under his microscope, and seeing "a titanic drama, never before imagined by the human mind." Words that could equally well describe John Taine's truly marvelous "Seeds of Life"....

(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of John Taine....)

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the many themes of science fiction is that of the super human ... people who have developed or evolved abilities beyond the norm. These super abilities can be explained by natural causes, intentional augmentation or even accident. Seeds of Life is an early twentieth century examplar of this theme.
The novel concerns the creation of a superior human using radiation. The author uses his knowledge of electronics and the inexorable logic of science to build up steadily mounting horror. For Bork, a lab assistant, accidentally discovers a secret of short x-ray waves that can mutate life -- pushing it millions of years ahead or equal millenniums back. He mutates almost overnight into a superman with a mind beyond any of the scientists for whom he had previously worked (it is reminiscent of the Keyes" Flowers for Algernon in this respect). He changes his name and uses his new powers to create amazing technological results, but the same accident also leads to other mutations including an incident where some brown hen eggs revert and what emerges is the common reptile-dinosaur ancestor of birds and mammals. His world becomes even more complicated when his mutations start to wear off and he comes to realize that what he’s set in motion is wrong, but he also can’t stop it.
The plot takes several more twists and turns, but that is not why I enjoyed this novel. Rather it is the imaginative take that it presents of the super human theme. In this it is an excellent early example and compares favorably with the work of later writers including my favorite, A. E. Van Vogt. His novel, Slan, considered a classic of this theme, used the concept of super-beings to explore the themes of racism, prejudice and what it means to be human. Other examples of the use of this theme include Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930), Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935), Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953) and Frederick Pohl's Man Plus (1976).
The critic Everett F. Bleiler found the opening segment of Seeds of Life to be "fascinating," but that as a whole "it suffers from formal defects, inadequate development at times, superfluity at others, weak characterizations, and problems with tone." Still, he concluded, "the novel is well worth reading for its virtues. And I would agree, particularly in that its' virtues in its consistent pursuit of the super human theme make this a book that holds the science fiction aficionado's interest to this day.

[Henri Moreaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published in Amazing Stories Quarterly in 1931, it was then released in novel form in 1951 through Fantasy Press in a run of 2,991 books. I read the 1955 edition published by Rich & Cowan.

John Taine is the pseudonym of mathematician Eric Temple Bell, he wrote both fiction & non fiction books, publishing the former under John Taine and the latter under his own name. Seeds of Life is one of the fifteen fiction books he wrote coming in around half way through his writing career.

The story whilst compact at 192 pages, is nonetheless quite a good read, it is set in the surrounds of the Erickson Foundation in a multi million volt electrical laboratory, a disgruntled assistant decides to destroy everything in the laboratory whilst simultaneously committing suicide by electrocution. However, rather than killing himself he destroys the laboratory whilst radiating himself with twenty million volts of x-rays leading to a mutation of his cells, and also creating the seeds of life, if you like.

Whilst it's not anything out of the ordinary in terms of early science fiction, I did enjoy it considerably more than some of the other early science fiction I've read and the writing was quite immersive and believably realistic science wise.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly good science fiction thriller from 1930 or 1931. It belongs to that early era of science fiction for which I'm not very enthusiastic. The extreme pessimism of the antagonist is very attractive to me, perhaps indicative of the author's mind's darker moments. There are some scenes of real terror (especially for arachnophobes) and the ending is not unduly happy; overall this novel is much more interesting philosophically than most products of the genre, regardless of era.

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unmemorable science fiction novel by John Taine, pseudonym for the mathematician Eric Temple Bell, snuck in between coursework during a busy semester.

[· · Rating 2 out of 5]

(22 October, 2025)

After an accident turns some schnook into a wayyyy above average human being, morality and all-too-ordinary human values go out the window. While playing fast and loose with science, evolution and human frailty, 'Seeds Of Life' still takes its time to set everything up, from background scenery and secondary characters to major protagonists and antagonists. This ass of a superman has a plan but does not divulge its real nature to anyone. Most think it benign but a few think this super assman is plotting something nefarious. What to do?

The question "Who am I?" is always asked by the same person but, in reality, it could apply to so many others. Some do things they would never have done in their regular, everyday lives but exceptional circumstances call for extreme measures.

This is more than a slow burn tale of how to thwart an overman's scheme, it is also an indictment of runaway Capitalism (caused by blind greed). If becoming rich beyond one's wildest dreams comes at the cost of becoming someone's tool or plaything, so be it, right? Urghhhh!

The last part sucks, it's just stupid. The author decides to explain everything after all the action is done... what a shitty decision. Even with that aside, the end is nonsensical, another really good story ruined by a terrible ending.