The World Set Free

"Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys give them thumbs
They make a club and beat their brother down"

Tool - Right in Two
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"Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came visible across the waste of water."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free

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The World Set Free is a war story. It's social commentary. It's a political pamphlet. It's science fiction, which is to say it's slightly scientific fiction featuring some largely fictional science. It's "a series of three fantasias of possibility" in Wells' own words or as we might call it these days, a future history. It's disjointed yet incisive and obsessive yet detached. It's apocalyptic and utopian, eerily accurate in some of its predictions but still touchingly naive on other points. Though not quite concise enough to amount to the same aphoristic avalanche, it lays the thunderous proclamations on thick enough to remind one of reading Nietzsche.

It's a book about a fictitious oncoming global war published in 1914, just months before the first of those that we're about to have a third of. Three decades before the first nuclear mushroom clouds, Wells wrote of aircraft dropping "atomic bombs" onto city centers. He also hoped the unprecedented destruction thus caused might prompt the leaders of the world into unifying our fractious species under one government. Good luck on that last part.

It's not an entertaining book. I doubt it was meant to be. Together with Tono-Bungay, The World Set Free builds up an understanding of human society out of the idiosyncrasies of the author's time, one oddity at a time. The latter book, as future histories are wont to do, even denies its readers a stable protagonist, flitting among the experiences of generation after generation. Certainly, a few themes repeat themselves, like Wells' obsession with airplanes:


"From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?"


It is, however, a very interesting book, more so with the benefit of hindsight. He correctly predicted the acceleration of nuclear fission could be used in both power generation and as an explosive, but he underestimated the extent to which it could be accelerated, so his nuclear bombs work more like slow-burning flames rendering an area uninhabitable for decades on end. Amusingly enough, he wound up predicting the result despite mistaking the mechanism. Neither did he foresee the effect of mechanization and automation on warfare; his atomic bombs are armed by biting off the ignition cap and chucked out of a passing aeroplane by hand. Nevertheless, many of his points remain valid: Britain's dangerous dependence on its empire, Germany's even more dangerous Prussic acerbity, an alliance of the central European powers, an opening move against Western Europe by sweeping through the Low Countries, even bombing the Dutch dikes, which though it's never been performed has remained a contingency plan of every military who's ever looked at the place - including a last ditch* "scorched Earth" tactic for the Dutch themselves. And in the midst of all this he even manages, as a casual aside, to hint at the Maslowian hierarchy of needs!

Many of Wells' observations and predictions tracked his contemporary writers' assumption of both the moral and practical need for socialism. The continuing centralization of wealth, the de facto disenfranchising effect of technological advancement on the working class. He also predicted the accumulation of economic surplus as military arsenals combined with a superfluity of unskilled labor would result in mass warfare. (In fact, he and many other thinkers of his time had been predicting the world war since the turn of the century.) While this was and is, by and large, correct, he also incorrectly placed the locus of control in each nation's leadership, and presented the abolishment (or willing abdication) of the old aristocracy as the solution to such conflict and the path to a global government:

"You know he is right as well as I do. Those things are over. We--we kings and rulers and representatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course we imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war, and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and more atomic bombs. The old game's up."

Well Herb, we got rid of the kings, and most of the old-school rulers, and castrated our representatives until they can't even admonish the rich against cannibalizing the poor, and I gotta tell ya, the old game? It is not up. Vermin with human faces are still breeding out of control, the vast majority of the population is still utterly superfluous, unfit for anything other than our dwindling manual labor requirements, and xenophobia and bloodlust have proven intrinsic to human nature. Wherever two or more are gathered unto the name of some symbol of in-group solidarity, some kin recognition surrogate, they will plot to exterminate all who are not in their midst.

But The World Set Free is noteworthy most of all as Wells' richest quote mine. Addressing the human spirit from the sensual and brutish to the cerebral and transcendent,  sweeping through history from cavemen to proletarians to infantrymen to kings who would be men, every chapter provides memorable imagery, poignant jabs at social mores, biting stabs at our animal nature. I had to stop myself from marking every single passage just so I could get myself to finish the book. It could be quoted on education, gender relations, socio-economics; its intoxication with science and intellectual progress could almost make one think such an enlightened technocracy waits just around the corner... were it not for the intervening century which has failed to produce such leadership. One might even call the story's final chapter describing a postwar Utopian society transcending its baser nature transhumanist, except that Wells' mouthpiece Karenin explicitly disavows the notion. So he even foresaw that misanthropic nerds like me would try to co-opt him on that point, damn his overgrown frontal lobe. The more I read Wells, the more I see him as one of the greatest minds in history.


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*pun very much intended