Tell of how we are going to destroy ourselves in nuclear fallout unless we come to peaceful agreements. He is most obviously an idealist and these things are mostly impossible. I like the fact that he identifies that if the majority is for a cause they are able to quickly shut down those who try to oppose it. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-world-set-free-a-fantasia-of-the-future-by-h...

This was written in 1913 and published in 1914. It’s quite a short book, an account of a near future where nuclear weapons are developed, major cities are devastated and the nations of the world come together to decide against future war and create a Utopia. It must have been at least indirectly inspiring for the creation of the United Nations thirty years later, and it’s striking how much closer to the mark he got with the impact of new technology on war than he did in The War in the Air, only six years earlier.

I have to say that as a novel it is not all that great. Good chaps, some of whom are royalty, get together in a remote resort to sort the world out, and there is not a lot of drama other than the big bangs of war. There are two named women characters, who have a dialogue on women’s place in the new order at the end. (And there’s a point-of-view unnamed secretary in Paris who witnesses one of the bombings in an earlier chapter.) It’s part of the chain of thought that ends with The Shape of Things to Come, and I think interesting mainly for that reason. ( )

Thank you Netgalley and publisher for the free copy in return for a review.

This is my first H.G. Wells novel. I chose it because of all the good things I heard about HG Wells. Before reading the book, I did some research and found out that H.G. Wells predicted the invention of the atomic bomb and the destruction it brings. At under 200 pages, this was supposed to be an easy read but it was not. It was slow paced and there was no real protagonist. It was a weird book and I was really bored. It took me several days to finish. I think I am not the audience for this book. Despite this, I still hope for the future that this book foresee. ( )

I’m setting myself free from this book. It is seen as prescient because it was written just before the First World War and described atomic bombs and nuclear warfare with what turned out to be reasonable accuracy. The first part of the book was OK, but when the book moved into quoting extracts from a fictional Great Novelist who described the nuclear war, I lost interest rapidly. It was hard to tell what was Wells’s narration and what was the fictional book. On the plus side, this book didn’t scare the pants off me like most books about nuclear warfare do. ( )

Like so much of Wells's writing, this combines his strength in popular history, scientific futurism and utopian ideas. It is best known as a novel predicting future discoveries in atomic energy, but (more significantly) also the social and political consequences of that knowledge. ( )