And that first glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story-teller, bright-eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. So slowly, by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the beast. From the beginning to the ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy eoliths of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. A sample:įor scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations, that life of our fathers went on. The descriptions give simultaneously a sense of wonder and foreshadow doom: mankind’s quest for knowledge will inevitably give it the power to destroy itself. Men start with crude tools and fire, eventually learn the secrets of explosives and combustion, to electricity, and then to nuclear power, their rate of knowledge acquisition always accelerating. The first third of the book is easily the most powerful and eloquent in my opinion, and gives a beautiful whirlwind history of humanity’s intellectual development from a quarter million years ago to the present. It is presented as a history of the important events of the 20th century, jumping back and forth amongst narratives of different eyewitnesses and major players in those events.

The novel was originally published as a serial in three parts: A Trap to Catch the Sun, The Last War in the World and The World Set Free.

(My discussion will contain spoilers in that I will give a broad overview of the plot.) In a sense, however, as we note below, it ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy! The World Set Free is a remarkable example of how science and science fiction can interact with and build upon each other. The novel tells the prophetic story of man’s harnessing of the (at that time) newly-discovered power of the atom, and how this power nearly destroys civilization in a catastrophic war. I recently read an edition of it given the more compelling title, The Last War: One of these is the truly fascinating 1914 novel, The World Set Free. A number of these were also very influential in their time, in surprising ways, but have been lost to the public consciousness as the years have passed.

Most of us know The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), but Wells wrote many, many more works, both fiction and non-fiction, during the course of his 60-year writing career. Wells” to anyone, and they’ll almost certainly be able to name a few of his books.

The world set free book