In a novel written on the eve of World War I, H. G. Wells imagines a
war "to end all wars" that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in an
enlightened utopia.
Writing in 1913, on the eve of World War I's mass slaughter and long
before World War II's mushroom cloud finale, H. G. Wells imagined a war
that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in a utopia of enlightened
world government. Set in the 1950s, Wells's neglected novel The World
Set Free describes a conflict so horrific that it actually is the war
that ends war.
Wells--the first to imagine a "uranium-based bomb"--offers a prescient
description of atomic warfare that renders cities unlivable for years:
"Whole blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the
trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in
comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond." 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.
With a cast of characters including Marcus Karenin, the moral center of
the narrative; Firmin, a proto-Brexiteer; and Egbert, the visionary
young British monarch, Wells dramatizes a world struggling for sanity.
Wells's 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.
Sarah Cole is the author of Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and The
Twentieth Century (2019). The Parr Professor of English and Comparative
Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University, she is the
cofounder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar and founder of the Humanities
War and Peace Initiative at Columbia. She is also the author of
Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (2003) and At the
Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (2012).
Joshua Glenn, who was the first to describe the years 1900-1935 as
science fiction's "Radium Age," has helped popularize stories from the
era for over a decade now. A former Boston Globe staffer and publisher
of the indie intellectual journal Hermenaut, he is coauthor of The
Idler's Glossary (2008), Significant Objects (2012), and the family
activities guide UNBORED (2012). He is also cofounder of the brand
consultancy Semiovox; and he publishes the blogHiLobrow.
