![]() ![]() The World Set Free is a prophetic depiction of a future society which breaks free from war - a hopeful, philosophical, and idealistic read that’s packed with imagination and ideas. So I was really excited to read a Wells book that’s been hidden in the shadow of his more famous works. Let me start by just coming out and saying it - I’m a big HG Wells fan. ![]() Wells’ supposedly happy ending - a planetary government presided over by European men - may not appeal to contemporary readers, but his anguish at the world’s self-destructive tendencies will strike a chord. With a cast of characters including Marcus Karenin, the moral centre of the narrative Firmin, a proto-Brexiteer and Egbert, the visionary young British monarch, Wells dramatises a world struggling for sanity. Drawing on discoveries by physicists and chemists of the time, Wells foresees both a world powered by clean, plentiful atomic energy - and the destructive force of the neutron chain reaction. Wells - the first to imagine a ”uranium-based bomb” - offers a prescient description of atomic warfare that renders cities unlivable for years. In a novel written on the eve of World War I, HG Wells imagines a war “to end all wars” that begins in an atomic apocalypse but ends in an enlightened utopia. ![]()
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