by H. G. Wells
With an Introduction by Greg Bear
(Bison Books [University of Nebraska Press] pb, 2001, $13.95, 166pp, ISBN 0-8032-9820-X)
Wells wrote the book in 1913 - for reasons which remain unknown he may have delayed publishing it, or had difficulty in placing it, but its influence lingered once it was public. Most importantly, it was a re-reading of The World Set Free in 1940 that persuaded Leo Szilard to approach Einstein and then F D Roosevelt to ensure that a non-Nazi power had the secret of atomic power.
Influenced by and extrapolated from the work of Frederick Soddy described in Soddy's Interpretation of Radium, published in 1909, dedicated to the scientist, and after a period in which he seemed to have been moving to novels on social issues, Wells had returned to "scientific romance". The World Set Free famously predicted the devastating power of an atomic bomb. It also gave a correct decade (though not year - 1933 as against the true 1938) for the first splitting of the atom, and in one of the pieces of serendipity common in his fiction, Wells forecast a war in which the major fighting would take place in Belgium and northern France. Contrary to the realities of the Enola Gay, though, in The World Set Free cities are devastated by a series of suitcase-sized atomic bombs, dropped by hand from aircraft. Equally wrongly, Wells assumes that many countries would have the bomb so soon after its invention. Later Wells describes the bomb sites remaining poisonous, but is unaware of the teratogenic effects of radiation.
Greg Bear's introduction deals in depth with Wells's relationship with Henry James, and how in a work such as this one Wells rejected "literature" as James represented it. Wells was to put this rejection into the mouth of the eponymous Boon in his 1915 novel. While it is fiction, it is difficult to read The World Set Free as a traditional novel - long pages have no characters as Wells sweepingly describes his future history or its philosophy. Only occasionally does he stop and swoop on some character at a seminal point - Holsten who discovers how to split the atom, Frederick Barnet a soldier in that devastating atomic war, an evil Balkan king who hangs onto his weapons, Prince Egbert who swaps talking to plants for participation in world government, Marcus Karenin who gives the world a new philosophy. At the time Wells was writing, a couple of novels which had dealt with devastations as a result of industrial processes run wild were still recent - George Allen England's Darkness And Dawn and Jack London's The Scarlet Plague, both Americans. British readers who read only British authors, though, would not have found Wells's style completely unfamiliar - Richard Jeffries had used it in the introduction to After London, describing snow falling on the city to destroy it, while readers used to radical works would have noticed little difference with the narrative method of Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man (a history, not future history).
In his extrapolation from the bombing Wells makes it clear that it is logistics and tactics which make the war worse. Although atomic bombs are used, it is the breaching of the North Sea dykes and seawalls which destroys most civil society. Something similar could have been done by strong storms or even determined insurrectionists. The result would have been the same.
Ignoring Sf as a genre, works which were influenced or echo the book can be found all over. Wells's first sentence "The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power" is a likely template for "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically", the opening of D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover; while a scene in which soldiers rescue a kitten from the North Sea is repeated almost straight in Arthur Ransome's We (Swallows and Amazons) Didn't Mean to Go to Sea. Like one of Richard Dawkins's memes, this was a book in which both style and content entered the minds of its readers and stayed there.
Although it is difficult to separate Wells's development into clear periods, he had appeared to give up science fiction around 1900, and instead wrote utopiae or social commentaries. The World Set Free then becomes one of those utopiae - after the destruction of the cities of the world, a small group of world leaders gather at Brassago in the Italian Alps and take control of affairs into their hands. Democracy gets short shrift, but everyone soon is happy. It must have been this section of the book that convinced Szilard to pass his secrets to the American government, he cannot have wanted to inflict the devastation described in the middle chapters. Presumably, Szilard shared Wells's optimism about how easily the world could be converted to a new utopia. We do not live in one, and it is difficult to describe the world portrayed by Wells as paradise either. Greg Bear pays less attention to the later parts of this short book, but one word which summarizes the section is "exterminist". In what can now be seen as an aberrant view Wells's narrator describes what is wrong: "the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the whole world, even in its most crowded districts, was filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which is now almost incredible". "Incredible" is a term that would now be used to describe exploiting virgin forests or regarding the natural world as "needless". During World War Two George Orwell wrote his reconsideration "Hitler, Wells and the World State" in which he criticized Wells and particularly his utopiae - it may not be a coincidence that Orwell was an amateur naturalist and that Wells was averse to the natural world. (One could also compare Wells's recollections in Experiment in Autobiography of learning natural history as a student with D H Lawrence's admittedly fictionalised accounts of his time in the laboratory. Wells talks vaguely about taxonomic systems, Lawrence about the glories seen under the microscope).
The World Set Free is a significant work since it shows what an intelligence might work towards. Nor is it a target easily rejected - Isaac Asimov accepted something very similar. Nevertheless there is a sight which sees a virgin forest and sees paradise, and there is another which foresees paradise in the same location when the forest is cleared. Unfortunately, it is the latter which is also able to describe the horrors of a nuclear war.