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The World Set Free
by H.G. Wells
We Are All Things That Make And Pass,
Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,
Out To The Open Sea.
TO
Frederick Soddy’s
‘Interpretation Of Radium’
This Story,
Which Owes Long Passages
To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book,
Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself
Contents
PREFACE
The World Set Free was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, andit is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories whichall turn on the possible developments in the future of some contemporary forceor group of forces. The World Set Free was written under the immediateshadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt thatdisaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of us realisedin the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will beamused to find that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturallywant to know the reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. Asa prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be rather aslow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat theforecast in Anticipations by about twenty years or so. I suppose adesire not to shock the sceptical reader’s sense of use and wont andperhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do with thisdating forward of one’s main events, but in the particular case of TheWorld Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the Great Warback, and that was to allow the chemist to get well forward with his discoveryof the release of atomic energy. 1956—or for that matter 2056—maybe none too late for that crowning revolution in human potentialities. Andapart from this procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the openingphase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the CentralEmpires, the opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of theBritish Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had beenpublished six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second remainsnow, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of theessentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), onwhich the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modernconditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge tosupremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. Therecould be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corpsmuttering, ‘These old fools,’ exactly as it is here foretold.
These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far outnumberthe hits. It is the main thesis which