The World Set Free by H.G. Wells
(The MIT Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Paul Kincaid
It is said that Leó Szilárd, who first came up with the idea of a chain reaction, and who was instrumental in the creation of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, was inspired by reading The World Set Free by H.G. Wells. I can see the novel inspiring the idea of the chain reaction, because Wells’s description of an atomic bomb tells us not of one huge blast but of a series of explosions that continue sometimes for years. Wells’s atomic bomb, therefore, is a form of chain reaction. It is perhaps less clear why anyone might be inspired by this novel to go out and create a nuclear weapon. The bomb first dropped, in these pages, upon Berlin has very little in common with the weapon unleashed upon Hiroshima, but its effects, both immediately and long term, are similarly devastating. This is not something anyone might want to emulate.
Of course, the horror of this weapon is the entire point of the book. For the story he wanted to tell, Wells needed horrendous, world-changing effects, and the atomic bomb was a convenient device for achieving that effect. Naturally, for anyone approaching this novel after 1945, the idea that a story that was written in 1913 and first published before the start of the First World War in 1914, might feature an atomic bomb is surely what is going to catch the attention. But that is not what the novel is about. The real subject of the novel might best be summed up in the title of a pamphlet that Wells published only a few months after this novel appeared, a pamphlet that was written in response to the opening of hostilities: “The War That Shall End War”.
This was an idea that Wells had first started to consider at the end of the 19th century. You can find traces of it, for instance, in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and Anticipations (1900), and it would continue to inform his work right up to The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Indeed, it might be argued that The World Set Free is a cruder if less baggy dry run for what would later become The Shape of Things to Come. Certainly, both novels are similar in outline: the world is plagued by poverty and inequality, and even though there are scientific advances (in this case, atomic power) the effects (fast, silent atomic powered cars and planes) improve the lot of some but cast others into unemployment. One scene, early in The World Set Free, eerily foreshadows the hunger marches of the 1930s, and of course is echoed in the scenes of social collapse at the beginning of The Shape of Things to Come. There is no guiding intelligence in this world, and so the nations drift into war. In 1913, when Wells wrote The World Set Free, and indeed in January to March 1914 when it was serialised, as “A Prophetic Trilogy” in Century Magazine, no one believed in the possibility of the war that would arrive so precipitately that summer. So there is no First World War in this novel, instead, as in The Shape of Things to Come, the cataclysmic war arrives at mid-century. But the conflict Wells describes curiously prefigures the 1914–18 war; the first British troops sent across the channel prepare for trench warfare in Belgium, and the planes that would carry out the nuclear attack are biplanes with open cockpits in which the passenger would manually lift the atomic bomb over the side of the cabin and then let it go once they have reached their target. By the time he wrote The Shape of Things to Come, it was still four years before the world would witness what aerial bombardment could achieve at Guernica, but at least he was able to visualise more modern planes and the devastation that conventional bombs could inflict. After The World Set Free, Wells would not again turn to the idea of nuclear warfare.
But all of this is merely the preface to what the novel is really about. In both The World Set Free and The Shape of Things to Come, war is madness, and in the midst of this madness a group of high-minded, sensible people come together and impose a new world order. In both cases, the resultant world government is not particularly democratic (I suspect that Wells was not exactly a democrat but rather believed that philosophers and technocrats should be the natural rulers, the samurai as he called them in A Modern Utopia (1905), and everybody else would be happy to accept that). The world government inevitably ushers in a utopia in which scientific advance benefits all, and common-sense reigns. This utopianism, which became the dominant strand in his work from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of his career, shows Wells to have been a curiously naïve optimist despite how clever he was. As soon as he decides to his own satisfaction that one course of action is right, everyone else will immediately see how sensible it is and immediately go along with it. We have seen so many times over the century or so since this novel first appeared how frequently that notion works.
This is the heart of it, this is what the novel is about: the equation of world government with utopia. It is there in his fiction, such as A Modern Utopia; it is there in his campaigning for a League of Nations that began in the midst of war; it is there in his non-fiction, such as the book that would be his best seller during his lifetime, The Outline of History (1920). He believed that the good of world government could only be achieved when right-thinking people recoiled from the catastrophe of war, and that is exactly what is laid out in The World Set Free, the atomic weapons are merely a mechanism to allow him to achieve that catastrophe.
It is not, to be honest, a very good book, mostly because of the formulaic way in which he lays out an argument he expressed better in other works. It is, indeed, more lecture than novel, many of the chapters share the broad, godlike perspective of The Outline of History in which individuals are absent from the general course of history. Then, every so often, he will remember that this is a novel, and focuses in on the representative experiences of one character, usually for less than a chapter before that individual disappears once more from the story. The viewpoint we are presented with is set some time after the events described, long enough that the success of the utopian experiment can be assumed rather than examined. Where a named person suddenly intrudes into the narrative, what we are given is a precis of something they wrote at the time, though it has been edited by the unknown future historian who is our narrator such that we never need to doubt the inevitable march of progress towards utopia. It is not exactly a gripping story, Wells wrote much that is a lot better than this, but it is interesting as an historical curiosity.
And it is as an historical curiosity, I think, that it owes its republication here in the new Radium Age series from MIT Press. Joshua Glenn has made the astonishing discovery that there was science fiction published between 1900 and 1930, and he has decided that it marks a stage in science fiction distinct from what came before and what came after. He has named this period the Radium Age, fixing its characteristic with Marie Curie’s discovery of Radium in 1898, and he has managed to persuade MIT Press to use it as the excuse for this series of reprints. Personally, I have doubts. I’m not sure to what extent Curie’s discovery shaped a distinct period in science fiction; I’m not sure how distinct this period was (after all, it included Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12) and the launch of Amazing Stories in 1926); and I’m not sure how overlooked much of this work was, since the MIT series includes Rose Macaulay’s What Not (1918) which came out in a handsome edition from Handheld only three years ago, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) which is hardly obscure. I suppose that The World Set Free (a minor work from a far from obscure writer) fits the remit of the Radium Age series better than anything else, if only because it actually refers to Radium. Though Wells takes his view of the topic not from Curie but from Frederick Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium (1909). But as I have suggested, it is used here simply as a device to kickstart the utopian experiment that is the real meat of the book, and in this it belongs in a continuum of Wells’s work that predates Curie’s discovery and extends well beyond the time limits Glenn has set into the 1930s and 40s.
The World Set Free is an interesting book, though not, I would think, an essential part of anyone’s library unless they are a Wells completist. But if it deserves to be known it should be as something other than as a representative of a so-called Radium Age.
Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.