World Set Free, The

H. G. Wells s The World Set Free Modern Alchemy Destroys the Economy... 

Less noted today is the fact that The World Set Free also posited the collapse of world economies as a direct result of atomic transmutation. In Wells s novel, gold was one of the by-products of the newly harnessed atomic energy that powered cars and houses. It thus became worthless. Wells begins his novel in a Soddyian vein, with a chapter entitled The Sun Snarers that recounts the history of mankind s use of energy. When he reaches the late medieval period in his story, Wells notes ... 

Wells, H. G. 1914. The World Set Free. In The First Men in the Moon, The World Set Free, and Short Stories. London Odhams, n.d. 165-312. 

See Haynes 1994. Most influential for the shift to biology and biological hubris was H. G. Wells s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), which became the basis for many films. However, Wells continued to use mad chemists , as in The Food of Gods, and How it Came to Earth (1904) and The World Set Free (1914). The latter novel is interesting not only because it was an apocalyptic call for World War I, but also because it narrates a history of chemistry that culminates in the development of a kind of nuclear fission bomb. Whereas this appears to anticipate the discovery of nuclear fission by the chemists Hahn and Strassmann in 1939, later mad scientist stories featured physicists as bomb-makers. 

Soddy wrote and spoke about the practical apphcations of radioactivity and envisioned nuclear energy as the basis for an advanced civihzation and as a solution to the increasing depletion of natural resources. His book The Interpretation of Radium (1914) inspired H. G. Wells to write his science fiction novel The World Set Free (published the same year). 

Just then, in 1932, Szilard found or took up for the first time that appealing orphan among H. G. Wells books that he had failed to discover before The World Set Free. Despite its title, it was not a tract like The Open Conspiracy. It was a prophetic novel, published in 1914, before the beginning of the Great War. Thirty years later Szilard could still summarize The World Set Free in accurate detail. Wells describes, he says ... 

H. G. Wells thought Nature less trustworthy when he read similar statements in Soddy s 1909 book Interpretation of Radium. My idea is taken from Soddy, he wrote of The World Set Free. One of the good old scientific romances, he called his novel it was important enough to him that he interrupted a series of social novels to write it. Rutherford s and Soddy s discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science-fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs. 

Several weeks earlier, looking for a patron, he had sent Sir Hugo Hirst, the founder of the British General Electric Company, a copy of the first chapter of The World Set Free. Of course, he wrote Sir Hugo with a touch of bitterness, still brooding on Rutherford s prediction, all this is moonshine, but I have reason to believe that in so far as the industrial applications of the present discoveries in physics are concerned, the forecast of the writers may prove to be more accurate than the forecast of the scientists, The physicists have conclusive arguments as to why we cannot create at present new sources of energy for industrial purposes I am not so sure whether they do not miss the point. ... 

English novelist H. G. Wells. His 1914 novel, The World Set Free, predicted atomic bombs, atomic war and world government. 

Although there are cases in the history of science when fiction writers like H. G. Wells (in The World Set Free, written in 1914) predicted scientific and technical breakthroughs (to an accuracy of a few years) such as the discovery of artificial radioactivity or even the first operation of a full-scale nuclear power plant (NPP) (see Wagar 2004). However artistic prophesies that have come true are retrospectively selected and interpreted in a way that is meant to astonish the reader of the present. And if such a prophecy never comes true, it will be forgotten, and no harm is done. 

H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (Quiet Vision Publishing, 2000 first published 1914), 48-49. David Kyle, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction (London Tiger Books, 1986), 165 Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts Atomic War in Fiction, chap. 1. Available online at http //public.wsu.edu/-brians/nuclear/. 

The British author and historian H.G. Wells is best known for his science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, in which human civilization must respond to hostile Martian invaders, but in 1914 (fells published another, lesser-known novel in which he prophesized terrible events. In his book The World Set Free, Wells foretold eruption of worldwide warfare. Moreover, aerial combat was employed in the war, and so was the use of atomic bombs. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing, Wells wrote. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. ... 

The World Set Free received positive reviews—a book critic for the New York Times called it a magnificent piece of workmanship —but the book suffered mediocre sales. And yet, although many members of the public declined to read the book, it would for many years find wide readership among the scientific community. In 1932 the Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard discovered the book, and afi er reading the story elected to devote his talents to the pursuit of fission. 

Hildegarde Hawthorne, The World Set Free New York Times, March 29, 1914, p. BR-141. 

Leo Szilard Inspired by the science-fiction novel The World Set Free, Szilard, a Hungarian-born physicist, dedicated his life to fission research. In 1933 he conceived the process of how chain reactions could be sparked by the release of neutrons from atomic nuclei. Six years later he convinced Einstein to write to Roosevelt, advising the president of the dangers of the Nazi atomic weapons program. 

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