The World Set Free

The World Set Free

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World Set Free, by Herbert George Wells This
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Title: The World Set Free
Author: Herbert George Wells
Release Date: February 11, 2006 [EBook #1059]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE WORLD SET FREE
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

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 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 opening campaign 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 honourable
gathering 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