The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World Set Free, by Herbert George Wells

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Title: The World Set Free

Author: Herbert George Wells

Release Date: February 11, 2006 [EBook #1059]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***

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 fairl