The World Set Free by H. G. Wells (best romance ebooks .txt) ๐
Description
After learning of atomic physics, H. G. Wells began to think of its potential impact on human society. In The World Set Free, atomic energy causes massive unemployment, shaking the already fragile social order. The ambitious powers of the world decide to seize the opportunity to compete for dominance, and a world war breaks out, echoing the looming Great War about to ignite in 1914. Waking to the catastrophe, humanity begins the hard search for a way into a better future. The novel traces a soldier, an ex-king, a despot, and a sage through a profound transformation of human society, and we gain a window into Wellsโ own thoughts and hopes along the way.
With one prophetic stroke, Wells gives the first detailed depiction of atomic energy and its potential destructive power, and predicts the use of the air power in modern warfare. He may have even directly influenced the development of nuclear weapons, as the physicist Leรณ Szilรกrd, shortly after reading the novel in 1932, then conceived of harnessing the neutron chain reaction critical to the development of the atom bomb.
Read free book ยซThe World Set Free by H. G. Wells (best romance ebooks .txt) ๐ยป - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: H. G. Wells
Read book online ยซThe World Set Free by H. G. Wells (best romance ebooks .txt) ๐ยป. Author - H. G. Wells
The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that is in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus far remained a dream.
H. G. Wells
Easton Glebe, Dunmow, 1921
The World Set Free A Story of Mankind Prelude The Sun Snarers ยง IThe history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands. Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of labour. He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more. Always down the lengthening record, save for a setback ever and again, he is doing more.โ โโ โฆ
A quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and subtropical river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.
He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.
So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.
Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the tigerโs claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon himโ โis at work upon him still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them tolerable to
Comments (0)