Sarah Cole
“The war that will end war”: H. G. Wells was one of the most famous writers and thinkers in the world when he coined the phrase in August of 1914, one week into the First World War. Like so many of Wells’s words, these were catapulted around Europe and the English-speaking world and well beyond, providing a shorthand for a particular notion about how lasting peace might be achieved. In later years, and up to our own day, the idea of a war to end war has been used as a tag for the First World War generation, an encapsulation of the naivety (or perhaps dangerous self-deception) of an age, a tragic ideal that was put to rest, once and for all, in 1939. Today, the phrase is mostly used ironically.
But Wells meant it. Among the modern industrial societies of the twentieth century, he believed, the only chance of preventing ever more catastrophic wars—a real chance, not only possible but probable, even inevitable—lay in the event of war itself. This was not a recommendation to wage war, but a recognition that the ineluctable slide toward ever-escalating mass warfare, which Wells diagnosed as the condition of the modern world order, held in itself the potentiality for transformational change. In the grip of catastrophe, people might be able to see clearly—sanely, was the term Wells often used—the insanity of war, and more broadly the insanity of nations as sites of loyalty and devotion. Watching our world crumble around us, he predicted, we would say, “this makes no sense.” A bloodless global revolution would follow this awakening, to bring peace for humanity and a better world for all time.
All of this was envisioned in a novel almost never read today: The World Set Free, published in April 1914, four months before the Great War erupted in Europe. With this reprint, The World Set Free emerges from a century of neglect, to illuminate Wells’s ideas about war and utopia, the science of his times, and also a form of literary experimentalism that has generally gone unrecognized.
It is a fascinating novel that takes an idea Wells had been germinating from his scientific reading on atomic energy and envisions its effects expanding out ferociously to a logical endpoint. In this sense, The World Set Free sits within the canon of Wells’s novels and fantastic tales, beginning with his first novel The Time Machine (1895), which asked where the class structure of the nineteenth century might lead a million years forward in time. This was a landmark text, which popularized the concept of time travel via technological invention and set in motion for Wells an orientation toward the future. As he would write of his subsequent scientific romances, “they are all ‘fantasias of possibility’; each one takes some great creative tendency, or group of tendencies, and develops its possible consequences in the future.” It became a construct for him, a form of anticipatory writing that helped shape the emerging genre of science fiction.
The tendencies projected by The World Set Free, which is set forty years in the future, in the 1950s, are the growth of a vast new field of energy (atomic), alongside humankind’s penchant for war. Together, these tendencies could lead to the world’s destruction—or else, perhaps, to its salvation. Wells’s novel sets out to dramatize several interconnected ideas. Evolutionarily, Wells insisted, humankind has barely changed since the days of the cave; yet we have created weapons that could lead us to annihilate ourselves as a species.
By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was starving or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.
With a sense of resignation, Wells adds: “Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.”
The single and only way to avert further catastrophe, argues Leblanc, a visionary humanitarian in the novel, is for the world’s leaders to agree that “war must end, and that the only way to end war was to have but one government for mankind.” Such a radical social transformation would only be made possible, Wells stressed, either by “civilization destroying itself down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions.”
The World Set Free is dedicated to exploring this latter alternative. But Wells was also fascinated by the more apocalyptic scenario. Total war was a staple of his writing and activism throughout his career. In The War of the Worlds (first serialized in 1897), which set the pattern for so many later tales of hostile alien invasion, Wells vividly imagines the Martians’ use of heat rays and poison gas to decimate humankind, beginning with the English town of Woking; in his 1934 autobiography, Wells recalls with amusement riding his bicycle around the area, looking for sites for his Martians to destroy. Later novels, including The War in the Air (1908), would figure the human destruction of the planet via new technologies of our own. If The World Set Free spoke powerfully to Wells’s contemporaries, it was because it envisioned not only new and terrible weapons but also a world that had moved beyond warfare.
Whether in full-length utopian reveries like A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923) or in The World Set Free, which begins apocalyptically but ends in utopia, Wells imagined alternate, improved worlds in rich detail. Today’s readers may find themselves distinctly unenthusiastic about Wells’s utopias—which are achieved through nondemocratic means (here, via a “frank and honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago”), and which may strike us as sterile and homogeneous. Worse, Wells’s ideal of social and physical perfectibility often has eugenic overtones. In The World Set Free, the wonderful character Marcus Karenin, a disabled man and one of the leaders of the new world order, submits himself for a surgery that will end his disability—and his life.
As is so often the case with Wells, forming value judgments is difficult here. That Wells locates the consciousness of his utopian future in the person of a disabled man seems progressive, and recalls one of his greatest short stories, “The Country of the Blind” (1904). That Karenin experiences his disability as a terrible deficit seems ableist and disappointing. Women’s roles in the Wellsian future can also fall short. Women in the final segment of The World Set Free are meant to participate in full equality, and Wells’s conservative contemporaries viewed him as a dangerous feminist, but by today’s standards women in these works seem bent on self-effacement and secondary citizenship. Additionally, though Wells meant for his world of the future to be universal and racially all-inclusive, it too often reads as distinctly western and mostly white.
The aspect of Wells’s utopias that most decisively marked his career was his view that the key to a better future lay in the unification of the world under a single government—and the concomitant eradication of not only nations but religions. Humankind itself must become the site of faith and loyalty for all humanity. Here, Wells kept company with predecessors and contemporaries like L. L. Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto in the 1880s, who believed that a unified language would put an end to war. In the years during and after WWI, Wells was engaged in practical terms with the founding of the League of Nations, disarmament conferences in the 1920s, and, later, the drive toward human rights. Wells himself authored a human rights manifesto in 1940 (The Rights of Man) which later became a model for the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. At the same time, Wells’s efforts to push the world toward unification spurred somewhat younger science fiction authors, including Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, to write novels in which visions of social revolution like Wells’s lead to horrifically dystopic new worlds. They saw in such a plan not the triumph of humanity but the defeat of the human being.
Although Wells’s utopianism may not resonate with readers today, many have remained intrigued over the years by his remarkable ability to forecast how science and technology would massively remake our world. Though he got some things very wrong, Wells’s prediction of everything from advertising schemes to moving walkways to air conditioning to the internet makes his writing uncanny, affording some fun and admiration. He was particularly prescient when it came to weaponry. From the tank (invented in a 1903 short story, “The Land Ironclads”) to aerial bombardment in The War in the Air, Wells’s readers were offered an immersive look at the mass killing that Wells believed was hurtling toward humanity.
In The World Set Free, Wells accurately imagines “atomic bombs” (he is credited with having coined this phrase) rendering cities unlivable for years. If the “zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio-active substance” does not perfectly capture how atomic bombs eventually would work, we can certainly recognize in Hiroshima’s aftermath this scene: “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. The shells of other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets against the red-lit mist.”
In 1913, as he was writing the novel, Wells was reading the English radiochemist Frederick Soddy’s The Interpretation of Radium (1908/1912), a collection of lectures. Soddy and Ernest Rutherford were two of the discoverers of radium’s properties. Their research and popular writing, following on discoveries by Marie Curie and others, had helped to bring into public consciousness a few key ideas of interest also to Wells: that there is instability at the atomic level, that radioactivity entails the emission of huge amounts of energy, and that manipulating this energy can have significant and ambiguous potential in the world. Wells modeled the science lecturer at the opening of The World Set Free on Soddy; and the final lecture in that sequence is an almost verbatim quote from Soddy’s book.
Twenty-five years before science got there, Wells extrapolated from Soddy’s lectures not only the future of atomic energy but also the use of atomic weaponry. Thus, Richard Rhodes’s history The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) begins with Leo Szilard, the physicist and inventor who would conceive of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, thinking back to his reading of The World Set Free as a 15 year old in Budapest. Just as scientists like Szilard took inspiration from Wells, he took inspiration from scientists. He kept up to date on experimental ideas, and collaborated with high-profile scientists on public outreach—becoming one of the most vocal advocates for scientific education.
Like Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and other pioneers of the genre that was not yet called science fiction, Wells launched his stories from new scientific or technological breakthroughs, thinking out their unintended, possibly horrific consequences. Yet for all that was dire and dark in these visions, he nevertheless believed that science would be humanity’s savior. This was the dialectic at the heart of his writing generally and of The World Set Free in particular: unchecked by the will of the collective human endeavor, science can wipe us out, but controlled by a sane and rational world organization, science can bring humankind untold happiness.
His fascination with science certainly brought Wells great benefits. Although his mother was a ladies’ maid and his father a shopkeeper (who played professional cricket), Wells resisted his destiny—he was supposed to enter the drapery trade at age 14—and ended up with a scholarship to study at the Normal School of Science, a new university founded to train teachers of science. His globally popular writings, from The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The First Men in the Moon (1901) to The Outline of History (1920), would follow from that education. Of particular importance was a year studying with his idol, Thomas Henry Huxley, the Darwinian biologist and grandfather of Aldous. He became wealthy and famous, with friends and collaborators at the very apex of the political and intellectual classes, and was connected with a huge array of people who were writing, thinking, creating, and making things happen in the early twentieth century.
Wells’s novels spun their material—scientific forecast, utopian hopes, violent catastrophe, evolutionary destiny, and the individual caught amidst these massive forces—into diverse literary forms. The World Set Free is one such modernist experiment. Its style ranges from impressionistic to didactic, and its narrative shifts from a primary, omniscient, third person narrator, ready to lecture on the world history of energy, to internal narrators such as Frederick Barnet, an eyewitness of the atomic wars, and Marcus Karenin. These individual voices seem to merge into a generalized, Wellsian narrator—one familiar to readers of his other works, across many genres.
The novel’s primary aesthetic conundrum is how to represent the atomic bombs—the novelty and destructive power of which push past the bounds of the familiar. Reaching into the history of representation, and especially its visual manifestations (painting, film), Wells grasps for language to depict the effects of these weapons. Sometimes our view is from above: We are watching along with those who drop the bombs. At other times the reader experiences the bombs from the perspective of their victims, or else from those who attempt to record the spectacle from the sidelines. The result is arresting:
And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon the Dutchmen’s dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.
And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood. . . .
Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying and a flurry of alarm bells. . . .
The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked. . . .
Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench, the waves came roaring in upon the land. . . .
Wells’s literary efforts, in a passage like this one, help to crystallize the awe and terror of warfare, as it smashes civilizations. For all the novelty of this new technology, the problem he confronts is one that has faced writers for millennia: how to be true to the horror of war and also to the way it draws the eyes and stimulates the imagination.