The dream of The World Set Free [is] a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world.
(The World Set Free, preface)

Wells and world government

Wells was terrifyingly prolific. He wrote more than 114 books, of which over 50 were novels.

From around 1901 onwards his books, both fictional and factual, increasingly testify to one central concern – the notion that the Scientific Age has, and will continue to, transform human society out of all recognition – and that all the old primitive traditions of nationalism, with its national governments and imperial rivalries, egged on by warmongering newspapers and ambitious politicians, rivalries which used to be settled by ‘limited wars’, simply could not afford to continue – because they will inexorably lead to the destruction of all human civilisation.

The weapons of the Scientific Age are now so destructive, and can be spread so far and wide through vast artillery and the new medium of air flight, that modern war will wreak death and devastation on a completely unprecedented scale. His thesis is that:

because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether.

The only solution Wells could see from the mid-1900s until the end of his life in 1945, was the establishment of a World Government, which would a) supersede the old nationalisms of redundant nation states in order to ensure global peace, and b) then set about organising the human population, its needs and resources, its cities and transport, its food and education, in a centralised, rational and logical way.

A brief history of the world

Written in 1913, The World Set Free is a fictional variation on this, Wells’s abiding theme. It is a history of the future, a prediction of what might happen, mostly set in the 1950s.

Readers of each new Wells book must, by this stage, have wondered what kind of book it would be: Would it be one of the taut, compelling science fiction yarns which he began his career with (Time Machine, Wor of the Worlds)? Or one of the broad social comedies (Kipps, Love and Mr Lewisham) he began to write at the turn of the century? Or one of the series of entirely factual books of scientific analysis and prophecy, which began with 1901’s best-selling Anticipations?

In the event The World Set Free is, as so often with Edwardian Wells, a hybrid or mongrel of all three.

The novel opens with a long factual account of human prehistory which reads like an article from an old-fashioned encyclopedia. Wells paints a convincing picture of Homo sapiens as a species which, in its animal ignorance, for millennia walked over the rocks which contained coal and iron ore, squelched through the rivers which contained the clay which could be made into porcelain. In other words, all around us have always been the untapped resources which it took us a long, long time to recognise, and then a long, long time to develop the technology to harness for our use.

He gives an overview of the slow development of fire, agriculture, stratified societies, cities, writing – in Mesopotamia, in China, in Mesoamerica – and how, in all of these societies, there arose the ‘dreamers’, the seekers, the explorers of things, the wonderers-how… Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci.

Man had not been always thus; the instincts and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an insatiable desire.

If you were an average reader of 1914, who had left school at 14 or 15, all this must have been wonderfully mind-expanding stuff. Placing our present-day society, with its cafés and motor cars, in the context of the long history of the human species, was a typically thrilling perspective.

These preliminaries lead in to an up-to-the-minute description of the latest discoveries about the structure of the atom and the radioactive decay of unstable elements, and learned speculation about how these might turn out to be yet another source of secret energy which has lain around us for millennia, but which humanity is now poised to refine and use for its good.

At this point what has in effect been a long history lesson turns into something more like a ‘novel’ with the introduction of specific characters. We are introduced to the inventor ‘Holsten’ who we follow for a few pages, as he ponders on the power of the atom. Maybe he is the protagonist of the story.

But no. We have only been with his discoveries and thoughts for a few pages, before Wells scoops us up and leaps decades into the future, beyond Holsten’s discoveries, to describe how people yet to be born will develop new motors and engines to harness nuclear power and transform the world, making car travel cheaper and quicker, and really establishing airplane travel as affordable and safe (remember this was written in 1913, when there were hardly any airplanes yet).

The ‘historical’ text pauses for a moment to set the scene in a courtroom where Holsten is a witness in a copyright dispute about the new technology, which is placed here solely to allow Wells to explain at length how ‘the law’ was a relic of primitive tribal conflicts, and in no way ready for the New Age of Scientific Knowledge. How it tends to hold back the pace of invention and change.

Then we are back to the high-level view of the historian of the future, explaining how this sudden accession of cheap energy not only led to new inventions, air travel, fast land travel and the revolutionising of most industry, but also led to economic upheaval leading to depression, unemployment, suicide and social unrest.

For the governments of the day were constitutionally unprepared for any kind of technological change. Here is Wells’s jaded view of contemporary government:

The world in these days was not really governed at all, in the sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.

Lawyers taking advantage of clunky electoral methods in order to seize advantage in the endless faction fighting which makes up real day-to-day politics, the last thing any of them being interested in is reluctantly conceding laws to feebly acknowledge social and technological changes which have already swept through society and everyone else can see are blindingly obvious.

Ring any bells?

Wells sets the big social and technological change he is describing in the mid-1950s. In his version of history, Holsten devises a machine for liberating the energy of the atom in 1933, there’s some delay before it can be practically applied, but once turned into practical form atomic energy introduces sweeping changes from 1953 onwards,

and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all about the habitable globe.

The last war

Having established the long sweep of human history which leads up to the invention of nuclear power, Wells moves on to part two of his book: The Atomic War.

War comes (apparently) because of old nationalistic and geographical rivalries and Wells (with astonishing accuracy) predicts it will result from the Central European powers attacking a Slavic Alliance.

He paints the war via three vignettes: hostilities have already broken out when we are introduced to a woman secretary based at Allied War Control headquarters in Paris. She is looking up at the tall, stern, unspeaking French military leader, Dubois, with womanly admiration, when a single plane flying high over the city drops an atom bomb on it.

Wells’s bomb is made of the fictional substance Carolinum and its chief difference from normal explosives is that it keeps on exploding (Chapter 2: section 4)

What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high and far.

Thus, in a moment, the tidy War Control becomes a vast crater, flooding with water from the river Seine, full of continually radiating explosive power. The woman just has time to crawl to the body of Dubois – which has been neatly chopped in half – and scream with horror, before the Seine flood comes in and drowns her.

The second source for Wells’s account of this future war is a book of memoirs published, the narrating historian tells us, much later, in 1970 by Frederick Barnet. This old man describes his young manhood, taking advantage of the new atomic flying machines to go on a grand aerial tour of Europe.

Back in London his father loses all his fortune and commits suicide with the result that Barnet is thrown out on the streets. Wells describes Barnet’s odyssey through a London unrecognisably changed by future technology, with glass-sheeted streets used by super-fast atomic-powered ‘cars’. Over his head is a network of pedestrian footpaths and bridges which make London look a bit like Venice.

I love all descriptions of the London of the future, enriching and transforming the gritty, polluted, windy city of the grim present.

Anyway, Barnet becomes aware of the poverty on the streets and witnesses a hunger march by the unemployed. It dawns on him that no-one is in charge. No-one is really directing the helter-skelter of technological and social change we are living though, and no-one has a plan for how to manage the human victims of these changes, the huge numbers of workers in the old industries – coal-mining, railways, ironworks – who have simply been thrown on the scrap heap when they weren’t wanted any more.

They were a sample of that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were being ‘scrapped’ – as horses had been ‘scrapped.’

For Wells Socialism wasn’t about justice for the working classes as such – it is always subsumed in a much vaster historical development in which he sees the old systems of law and ownership reaching a breaking point, because they are based on technological and scientific levels of knowledge which have been made redundant.

Those traditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enough for every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and revenge.

And then – the war breaks out, giving Barnet a job and a purpose, along with a lot of other unemployed men and with the population as a whole, which is swept up in a great communal moment of solidarity.

He enlists in the British army and is full of young-man enthusiasm to go off and fight. Via Barnet Wells gives us some startlingly prophetic descriptions of trench warfare, all sniping and boredom, on the front with Germany. Then Barnet is entrained up to Holland and is just supervising a platoon of men when German planes drop a dozen or so atom bombs on the dam and canal network of Holland resulting in unprecedented destruction. Cue descriptions of apocalyptic waves, national destruction, and an aftermath of muddy water in all directions littered with corpses.

In the third vignette a tough-minded French aviator flies with just a co-pilot all the way to Berlin, where he drops three atom bombs which obliterate the city.

These three stories comprise Well’s description of the great atomic war of the mid-1950s, which now escalates uncontrollably. Every power makes pre-emptive strikes on every other power, with the result that 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.

The World Council

As is often the way in this kind of world-shaping science fiction, a World Council is called. The idea is proposed by the French ambassador to Washington, Monsieur Leblanc, who chooses a remote village in the Italian Alps, Brissago. To the council are invited representatives of the surviving nations.

Wells now introduces a new act in the novel and markedly changes the tone. It becomes comic because we now zero in on the efforts of one ‘King Egbert’, King of a Ruritanian little country in the Balkans who wants to abdicate his royal prerogatives in the name of the new collective government – much to the comic chagrin of his brainy adviser, Firmin.

There is a scene right out of the Prisoner of Zenda, when the King of the Balkans tries to bomb the assembly of leaders and seize control of The World. But the plane he sends with atom bombs is shot down by a well-organised anti-air defence. Young Egbert and officials of the new world state are then sent to the Balkans to interview the King. The latter suavely pretends to know nothing about the attempt to blow up the council, but – in the middle of the night – sets off with his evil adviser to the secret hiding place of the remaining atom bombs. But Egbert and the security men from the council have followed him and there is a dramatic shoot-out in the aircraft hanger in which the King and his men are shot down. With that, organised resistance to the new World Government disappears.

If you had had any lingering thoughts that this was a serious novel, this scene demolishes them. the whole book is a series of linked sketches or scenes, more like a theatrical ‘revue’ than a continuous narrative.

Barnet’s Britain

In another sequence we return to Frederick Barnet who is, by now, in charge of troops guarding the perimeter of radioactive Paris. After descriptions of the refugees fleeing the devastated city, Barnet is shipped back to England to discover a land without money, government or food. A land where food supplies are protected by armed guard and vigilante groups, strangers are hassled or shot, where thieves are hanged at the perimeters of armed settlements: the same post-apocalyptic scenes he depicted so well in The War In The Air.

This is a powerful sequence which could have come out of a much more recent thriller about post-apocalyptic Britain, completely different in tone from the semi-comic King of the Balkans sequence.

But mostly Wells flies at a high level, a historian’s level, describing in very general terms how the new world government comes about i.e. more or less by accident; how it doesn’t waste time writing a constitution but sets up committees to address pressing problems such as the stabilisation of currency, the restoration of trade, the building of houses for displaced populations, and so on.

Now, in the postwar future, all of these things are planned and organised at a high level and in a rational way. Cheap atomic energy allows cities to be built anywhere. Cheap atomic energy drives agricultural equipment and provides cheap fertiliser so, in this new world, food can be grown almost anywhere and quickly and cheaply distributed.

Wasn’t there resistance to this new order? Some. But most people had been shocked by the collapse of civilisation into acceptance of the new rules.

For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly all the clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerent separations had now been brought to realise the need for simplicity of attitude and openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order

So a new World Government isn’t imposed from the outside; it grows organically out of the needs of a world brought to the edge of destruction and is the result of intelligent people everywhere realising that they can’t go back to the old ways – to capitalism, unbridled competition, to the chaos and anarchy of industrial over-production. From now on everything is planned rationally and logically.

And, the narrator boasts, once liberated from the restraint of physical or long-hour labour, it turns out that most people want to be artists and to beautify life.

The world broke out into making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making. This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the ‘Efflorescence,’ is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority of our population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration, decoration, and refinement.

The entire population of the world turns into Radio 4 listeners.

Wells then gives us a chapter about the need for, and implementation in his Brave New World, of universal education.

He then gives us an interesting short chapter suggesting that the central theme of the novel since its inception has been the conflict between the restrictions of society and the impulse to overthrow and escape them, an impulse which quickened and gained force among the protagonists of late-nineteenth century and early twentieth century fiction.

The Last Days of Marcus Karenin

And just when you’d have thought Wells had written all he had to say on the subject, there is a last, long chapter devoted to ‘The Last Days of Marcus Karenin’.

Who was Marcus Karenin? The bad-tempered hunchback who helped introduce universal education to the New Order. He goes to a sanatorium in the Himalayas for an operation he knows will kill him. In his last days various young people are brought on stage so he can tell them about the stupidity of the pre-atomic age and they can ooh and ah at its greed and violence and narrow-mindedness.

It is exactly the same tone of the narrator in In The Days of The Comet, another novel where the world is transformed out of all recognition and where the future narrator addresses the young, post-change generation living in the New World, who can barely believe how spendthrift of resources, selfish, competitive and destructive the old system was.

While this sort of talk creates an emotional thrill – the thrill of looking back on our present civilisation from an imagined future – it is liable to the same criticism as all the other future histories: that it takes a cataclysm to get from here to there. That the world has to be all but destroyed to bring about the Millennium.

To gas-and-water socialists like the Fabians, Well’s books were, ultimately, thrill-providing fantasies – all very exciting for thrill-seekers but absolutely useless as any kind of practical guide on to how to improve the lot of the poor, the uneducated, the unhoused and so on in the here and now.

Among the group brought in to chat to the dying seer, Karenin, is a poet who tries to persuade the old man that a great awakening of love is taking place, of sexual love.

But Karenin corrects him and says sex is fine in its place, but we will all live longer lives now and outlive the sex drive of the young. Long life will free our minds of the dominance of sex and give us the peace to think about infinitely higher things.

The book ends (rather surprisingly) with some pages of feminism, in which Well’s mouthpiece says that the very notion of gender is stone age, out of date. Both sexes must rise above it and become pure, ungendered human intelligences.

‘Karenin?’ asked Rachel, ‘do you mean that women are to become men?’
‘Men and women have to become human beings…’ [said Karenin]
‘To think of yourselves as women is to think of yourselves in relation to men. You can’t escape that consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves – for our sakes and your own sakes – in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease to be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures.’

Which is fine, which is interesting, but this final scene hasn’t really been earned by the book, doesn’t really evolve organically out of the narrative. Instead it is another scene placed in the sequence of scenes which make up this revue of the future. And, very obviously, it is one of Mr Wells’s hobby horses, another example of Wells’s compulsion to throw everything he’s thinking about into a book, along with the kitchen sink.

With some of his last words, Karenin predicts that this ungendered human intelligence will eventually break free of the planet and set off into space, exploring and becoming one with the great universe.

‘These old bodies, these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel like that – like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take us?’

‘Beyond humanity,’ said Kahn.

‘No,’ said Karenin. ‘We can still keep our feet upon the earth that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley slave….

‘In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will reach out…. Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will follow them….’

These are extraordinary visions to be having in 1913. They must have dazzled his readers. But a hundred years later, we know that these fine fantasies, which fuelled a century of scientific endeavour… are not to be. We are very much locked up in our own planet. And we are very much destroying it through the small-minded selfishness which Wells so feared.

Some science prophecies

Wells’s predictions of the future are hugely enjoyable if often completely wrong.

He thought airplanes would use flapping wings and a central helicopter set of rotors. In all his novels which feature air battles, the pilots or their co-pilots fire rifles at each other, sometimes getting up or leaning out of the plane to do so.

His prediction that the atom would be split in 1933 was close to the actual date, but atomic energy was used in weapon form in 1945 not 1955 – and then to entirely destructive result.

73 years later (!) we do use nuclear power in a general way to provide power for electricity grids, but it has turned out to be dangerous to run (Three Mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) and have extremely toxic by-products which we don’t know how to safely store.

Wells’s guess at how an atom bomb would work turned out to be wildly wrong – he thought it would continue churning out massive heat and explosive power indefinitely, a permanent explosion rendering areas where was one was dropped permanently uninhabitable. In the event, it turns out that they produce the same kind of one-off explosion as dynamite, just on an immensely bigger scale.

And neither Wells nor anybody else guessed at the profound damage which could be done to all living organisms by radioactivity.

It is also sweet that he thought the atom bombs would be big black round things (as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon) with two handles (a bit like 1970s spacehoppers). The co-pilot of the plane dropping them had to hold one over the edge – and then lean out and use his teeth to bite off the top of a celluloid strip – which allowed air into the mechanism and started the radioactive process. Charmingly amateurish. Like a Heath Robinson cartoon.

Critique

The need for a World Government to stop humanity blowing itself up became the over-riding, obsessive concern of Wells in all his writings for the next thirty years.

There are three obvious ripostes.

1. Joseph Conrad wrote Wells a letter pointing out that all his ideas fail to take into account the depravity and evil of people. Wells just wishes it away. But the twentieth century showed us not just that politics was tribal and judges wore silly wigs and newspapers are often little more than propaganda sheets. It also showed us that people enjoyed rounding up Jews and exterminating them. Or Armenians. Or kulaks. Or gypsies, or homosexuals, or the traitors or saboteurs or spies or whatever other names they give to ‘the other’ which must be exterminated so that the nation can be pure.

It showed us that most human nature is not waiting to be ‘set free’ to make baskets and flower arrangements. Or, if some human natures are, plenty of other are waiting to be set free to wear para-military uniforms and beat up foreigners.

2. Wells’s World Governments always come about after an event so seismic that it has more or less abolished old human nature or inaugurated an entirely new type of human: as in the magic gas which profoundly changes human nature in In The Days of The Comet or the ‘moral shocks’ administered by the complete collapse of civilisation depicted in The War In The Air.

But we now know that you can have two world wars of almost inconceivable destruction and it doesn’t change human nature one whit. In other words, human nature with all its manifold shortcomings, is simply not as malleable as Wells hopes.

3. On a narrow political view, Wells foresees the intervention of the World Government ‘withering away’:

It became more and more an established security and less and less an active intervention.

because the committees devoted to specific aspects – money, language, building, agriculture – do their jobs so well, and are so responsive to local needs, and work so rationally that they can’t be improved.

What this view of humanity leaves out is the problem that people have irreconcilable views. This is why democratic politics was, is and always will be a messy business of irrational compromises. Because people disagree about things, about everything, passionately, and the government has to somehow hold the ring and forge compromises.

In other words, government can never be rational because human beings will never be rational. Wells thinks something like a world war will shock people into becoming a new type of person.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

But two world wars came and went and nothing in human nature changed. I grew up in a world dominated by communist tyrannies (Russia, China) and military dictatorships (Chile, Spain, Portugal, Greece). As John Gray has made a living pointing out, when it comes to human nature, nothing changes.

The book’s structure

Prelude – The Sun Snarers
Chapter the First – The New Source of Energy
Chapter the Second – The Last War
Chapter the Third – The Ending of War
Chapter the Fourth – The New Phase
Chapter the Fifth – The Last Days of Marcus Karenin

Related links

• The World Set Free online
• The World Set Free Wikipedia article

Other H.G. Wells reviews

1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end

1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change

Other science fiction reviews

• Full list of science fiction reviews