The World Set Free

- Blurb -

In a novel written on the eve of World War I, H. G. Wells imagines a war "to end all wars" that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in an enlightened utopia. Writing in 1913, on the eve of World War I' s mass slaughter and long before World War II' s mushroom cloud finale, H. G. Wells imagined a war that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in a utopia of enlightened world government. Set in the 1950s, Wells' s neglected novel The World Set Free describes a conflict so horrific that it actually is the war that ends war. Wells-the first to imagine a "uranium-based bomb"-offers a prescient description of atomic warfare that renders cities unlivable for years- "Whole blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. " Drawing on discoveries by physicists and chemists of the time, Wells foresees both a world powered by clean, plentiful atomic energy-and the destructive force of the neutron chain reaction. With a cast of characters including Marcus Karenin, the moral center of the narrative; Firmin, a proto-Brexiteer; and Egbert, the visionary young British monarch, Wells dramatizes a world struggling for sanity. Wells' s supposedly happy ending-a planetary government presided over by European men-may not appeal to contemporary readers, but his anguish at the world' s self-destructive tendencies will strike a chord.