



Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger





THE WORLD SET FREE

H.G. WELLS


We Are All Things That Make And Pass,
Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,
Out To The Open Sea.


TO

Frederick Soddy's

'Interpretation Of Radium'

This Story, Which Owes Long Passages To The Eleventh Chapter Of That
Book, Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself




PREFACE

THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and
it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories
which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some
contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was written
under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in
the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting
it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the
crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put
off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason for
what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the author
must confess he has always been inclined to be rather a slow prophet.
The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the
forecast in Anticipations by about twenty years or so. I suppose a
desire not to shock the sceptical reader's sense of use and wont and
perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do
with this dating forward of one's main events, but in the particular
case of The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding
the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well
forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956--or for
that matter 2056--may be none too late for that crowning revolution in
human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over forty
years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was fairly lucky; the
forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaign
through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary
Force were all justified before the book had been published six months.
And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after the
reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of
the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on which
the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern
conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge
to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either
side. There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is here
foretold.

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far
outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest
now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge,
separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer
possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system
