The World Set Free – H. G. Wells – The World Set Free is a novel by H. G. Wells, first published in 1914. Continuing a theme of Wells’s work – that of the history of technological advancement by humans, The World Set Free tells of a war fought with the most destructive weapon the world has ever seen – an atomic bomb. The novel’s solution to the threat of these weapons is a one world government. Set in motion by the King of Britain, very few of the leaders of the world resist, and those that do are defeated. Thereafter, there is a creation of a utopian society, and with atomic energy solving the problem of work, the vast majority of the population are artists.
H. G. Wells knew a little about atomic physics from reading the works of scientists such as William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy. Physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, the same year the neutron was discovered. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is sometimes called the ‘father of science fiction.
During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the ‘Shakespeare of science fiction’, while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a ‘wild talent’.
Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed ‘Wells’s law’ – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as ‘O Realist of the Fantastic!’. His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
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