The World Set Free

by H.G. Wells [Herbert George Wells]
WE ARE

ALL THINGS THAT
MAKE AND PASS,

STRIVING UPON A
HIDDEN MISSION,

OUT TO THE
OPEN

SEA.
THE WORLD SET FREE

H.G. WELLS
TO

FREDERICK SODDY'S
'INTERPRETATION OF RADIUM'

THIS STORY, WHICH OWES LONG PASSAGES
TO THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER OF

THAT BOOK, ACKNOWLEDGES
AND INSCRIBES

ITSELF
PREFACE

THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in
1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of

possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments
in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The

World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the
Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that

disaster was ending" target="_blank" title="a.即将发生的">impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of
us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to

us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off
until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason

for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a
prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to

be rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of
reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about

twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical
reader's sense of use and wont and perhaps a less creditable

disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating
forward of one's main events, but in the particular case of The

World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the
Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well

forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.
1956--or for that matter 2056--may be none too late for that

crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this
procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening

phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of
the Central Empires, the openingcampaign through the

Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force
were all justified before the book had been published six months.

And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after
the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the

essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second,
Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the

forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite
impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and

concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There
could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the

scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is
here foretold.

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story
far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of

interest now; the thesis that because of the development of
scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate

sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to
attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon

disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether.
The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity

of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war
on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to

break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind.
I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and

of the English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be
'God's Englishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute

effort of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the
school book footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead

of a frank and honourablegathering of leading men, Englishman
meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences

and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in
Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of

(Allied) Nations (excluding the United States, Russia, and most
of the 'subject peoples' of the world), meeting obscurely amidst

a world-wide disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading
problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast

enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the
necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.

Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity
and thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would

seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards
social disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on

continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and
wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of

lessons pale into disregard.
The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question

whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of
creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to

destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world. It is
clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that

there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees
few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness

of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs
demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries

us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any
plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something

overriding any national and patrioticconsideration, and that is
in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour

internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a
profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained

through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at
the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction

and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly
be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged

through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve
anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains

that it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that
any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far

appeared. The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly
educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily

setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus
far remained a dream.

H. G. WELLS.
EASTON GLEBE,

DUNMOW, 1921.
CONTENTS

PRELUDE
THE SUN SNARERS

CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR

CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENDING OF WAR