The World Set Free

3 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
From the perspective of 1913, Wells imagines an alternate future that goes through a hell of atomic war but ends up with local democracy, a world government, and productive, contented citizens.

Review
Much as Robert Heinlein's, For Us, the Living was a loose story framework intended to showcase socio-economic essays, Wells' The World Set Free is less novel than thought experiment. Broken into six sections, it sets up a world of atomic power in which, fumblingly and loosely, well-intentioned leaders set the world on a more constructive path.

Not all is resolved. In the final pages, a philosopher argues with two women about gender, with the former wanting to abolish most gender distinctions and the latter uncomfortable. And the new world council, while posited to work, is described as a haphazard, rather ramshackle, and entirely undemocratic affair. This is not utopia, but there are certainly utopian elements. At last, humans are free to bring their creativity to the fore, there is local democracy (if not global), and people are broadly happy and prosperous.

Wells, while admitting the flaws of his broad concept of governance, elides almost all of the essential elements of how it would work. Atomic power, initially a terrible instrument of war, resolves our problems almost without effort. World leaders willingly give up power – though remain in charge. There's a good deal of wish fulfillment here, if tempered with realism.

In fact, Wells seems to simply be sketching out one possibility for how the world could progress – one path through which, despite ourselves, we could succeed. It's a somewhat interesting if not very convincing story, and it ends very abruptly.

Wells' book is in some ways a better story that Heinlein's. It's more cohesive and makes more pretense at narrative. It covers a similarly long time period, but walks us through it, with a few recurring, sequential characters. All the same, it's impossible to mistake this for an actual novel – it's much too directed and didactic for that. It's also fairly Euro-centric, but not terribly so.

The preface, added much later, admits to error. Wells, in 1913, mis-predicted the start of World War I by decades. And he pointedly regrets the lack of a unifying, world government-creating figure in the real world. But he does get right a number of things that could have grown into the world he envisions. The League of Nations, apocalyptic power of nuclear weapons, suffrage, gender equality, the potential (still unrealized now) of the single transferable vote. All these are things might have worked out differently, and it's hard to argue that our world is better than the one Wells imagines. His war is worse, but we've had many more, with less to show for it.

All in all, an interesting if fairly dry read.

This is a book that did not age well. H.G.Wells explores atomic power, seeing it as powering industry (atomic powered planes and cars) as well as weapons of warfare. But he wraps it in a manifesto of his thoughts on the future of humanity and one world government and the story falls dead under the weight of his postulations.

There are three main sections. First he looks at how people have powered their world through history, and how such things as steam power took a long time to emerge even when people had been seeing the lid bounce on top of a boiling kettle for centuries. And nobody ever thought, "Hey, I could use that power for something." Similarly, he tells of a man who studied glow worms and luminescence and thought, "That thing is releasing energy in small doses. I wonder how I could speed it up." And from such thoughts of radiation came atomic power.

Second section is the story of atomic bombs being dropped by hand from aeroplanes like large grenades. Because of the half life of radiation the bombs keep exploding for weeks. Most major cities are destroyed in an orgy of destruction. Had he written a complete novel on this portion alone it would have been a much better book.

Third section is a long long long diatribe about peace coming through the voluntary giving up of all political power to a single world wide authority and the people of Earth can then live in peace by focusing on art instead of farming.

There is some value in reading about his understanding of radiation etc, considering that the book was written in 1912. He gets lots of stuff wrong, and his view of the future is limited. For example, his atomic powered planes in the war he sets in 1955 are still fabric covered timber frame machines and the bombs are dropped over the side by hand by the copilot. As a writer who saw the talk of a looming war on one hand and talk of nuclear power on the other, he joined the two pretty well.