The World Set Free

The World Set Free is a novel by H. G. Wells, written in 1913 and published in 1914. In his preface, dated 1921, Wells describes it as the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories that turn on the possible future development of some contemporary force or group of forces. The book is dedicated to Frederick Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium, and Wells acknowledges that the story owes long passages to the eleventh chapter of that book.

The work is organised as a preface, a prelude titled The Sun Snarers, and five chapters: The New Source of Energy, The Last War, The Ending of War, The New Phase, and The Last Days of Marcus Karenin.

The prelude opens with a sweeping account of human history as the history of the attainment of external power. Wells calls man the tool-using, fire-making animal and traces his rise from a savage sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough flint or a fire-pointed stick, to a creature who adds the strength of the horse and the ox, the force of water and wind, and tools of copper and then iron. He describes the slow work of necessity, which sharpened the tiger’s claw and refined the clumsy Orchippus into the horse, and which also shaped early humans. Their herds grew larger, taboos made sons tolerable to their fathers, and huts, garments and stored food let people spread into colder climates. Leisure brought thought, pictorial art and pottery, and the early dream that a man might snare the sun.

The preface tells us what the later chapters are built around. Wells places the coming of a great war in the year 1956, a delay he attributes partly to a habit of being a slow prophet and partly to a wish to give the chemist time to advance toward the release of atomic energy. He notes that some details of his imagined opening of the war proved close to the real thing: an alliance of the Central Empires, a campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force. He also points to his forecast that no great general, no Alexander or Napoleon, could emerge under modern conditions.

Wells admits that the misses outnumber the hits. What he thinks still matters is the main thesis: that because of the growth of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and empires are no longer possible, and that clinging to the old system heaps disaster upon disaster and may destroy the race. The story imagines a sort of epidemic of sanity among rulers and leaders, with figures such as King Egbert, meant to be God’s Englishman, leading mankind toward a bold effort of salvage and reconstruction, with gatherings of leading men from rival nations at Brissago in Switzerland.

By 1921 Wells sees that dream as unfulfilled. He contrasts it with the League of Nations at Geneva, which he calls poor and obscure, and he suggests that the world has grown accustomed to a glide toward disintegration. He sees a plain idea of a human commonweal only in the working class movement, tied to the prospect of profound and possibly violent social revolution. The preface closes by calling the book’s dream of educated rulers reshaping the world one that has so far remained a dream.