https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-world-set-free-a-fantasia-of-the-future-by-h...

This was written in 1913 and published in 1914. It’s quite a short book, an account of a near future where nuclear weapons are developed, major cities are devastated and the nations of the world come together to decide against future war and create a Utopia. It must have been at least indirectly inspiring for the creation of the United Nations thirty years later, and it’s striking how much closer to the mark he got with the impact of new technology on war than he did in The War in the Air, only six years earlier.

I have to say that as a novel it is not all that great. Good chaps, some of whom are royalty, get together in a remote resort to sort the world out, and there is not a lot of drama other than the big bangs of war. There are two named women characters, who have a dialogue on women’s place in the new order at the end. (And there’s a point-of-view unnamed secretary in Paris who witnesses one of the bombings in an earlier chapter.) It’s part of the chain of thought that ends with The Shape of Things to Come, and I think interesting mainly for that reason. ( )

Thank you Netgalley and publisher for the free copy in return for a review.

This is my first H.G. Wells novel. I chose it because of all the good things I heard about HG Wells. Before reading the book, I did some research and found out that H.G. Wells predicted the invention of the atomic bomb and the destruction it brings. At under 200 pages, this was supposed to be an easy read but it was not. It was slow paced and there was no real protagonist. It was a weird book and I was really bored. It took me several days to finish. I think I am not the audience for this book. Despite this, I still hope for the future that this book foresee. ( )

I’m setting myself free from this book. It is seen as prescient because it was written just before the First World War and described atomic bombs and nuclear warfare with what turned out to be reasonable accuracy. The first part of the book was OK, but when the book moved into quoting extracts from a fictional Great Novelist who described the nuclear war, I lost interest rapidly. It was hard to tell what was Wells’s narration and what was the fictional book. On the plus side, this book didn’t scare the pants off me like most books about nuclear warfare do. ( )

Like so much of Wells's writing, this combines his strength in popular history, scientific futurism and utopian ideas. It is best known as a novel predicting future discoveries in atomic energy, but (more significantly) also the social and political consequences of that knowledge. ( )

The most notable thing about this sf novel is that in 1914 Wells predicted atomic energy and atomic warfare. It’s too bad no one heeded his warning. In fact it seems his ideas inspired the scientists who worked on the atom bomb. This is the only book of 1914 I encountered that admitted the possibility of a war that would kill millions, even as such a war got underway. This book doesn’t have a plot or main characters in a traditional way. It’s a history book from the future, and the first chapter (the “prelude”) covers actual history. The rest of the book covers the development of atomic power which essentially creates free energy that destroys the world economy, and then atomic war destroys all the major cities, killing everyone and leaving a radioactive landscape. However, after that the book becomes remarkably upbeat as the survivors create a world government that unifies the planet. You get snapshots of life from different people throughout the book. Other than a kind of dismissive attitude toward India, this book isn’t even racist. The edition I read had an actually interesting introduction, by Greg Bear, comparing Henry James and Wells, who were frenemies. Bear says that this was the moment when speculative fiction and literary fiction parted ways. Spec fic (along with my bff Arnold Bennett) was dismissed as trying to get people to believe in something and too action/plot oriented. Literary fiction was elevated for being sexless, bloodless, and more about money and people’s inner lives than stuff happening. Bear puts forward the non-dual POV that there’s no reason these two styles had to be opposed to each other. Anyway, I thought it was notable that this was one of the few books of 1914 that has been reprinted by a reputable press with attention paid to the book design—because actual normal humans might want to read this book. ( )