In a novel written on the eve of World War I H. G. Wells imagines a war to end all wars” that
begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in an enlightened utopia. Writing in 1913 on the eve of
World War I’s mass slaughter and long before World War II’s mushroom cloud finale H. G. Wells
imagined a war that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in a utopia of enlightened world
government. Set in the 1950s Wells’s neglected novel The World Set Free describes a conflict
so horrific that it actually is the war that ends war. Wells—the first to imagine a
uranium-based bomb”—offers a prescient description of atomic warfare that renders cities
unlivable for years: 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.” Drawing on discoveries by physicists and chemists of the time Wells
foresees both a world powered by clean plentiful atomic energy—and the destructive force of
the neutron chain reaction. With a cast of characters including Marcus Karenin the moral
center of the narrative Firmin a proto-Brexiteer and Egbert the visionary young British
monarch Wells dramatizes a world struggling for sanity. Wells’s supposedly happy ending—a
planetary government presided over by European men—may not appeal to contemporary readers but
his anguish at the world’s self-destructive tendencies will strike a chord. Sarah Cole is the
author of Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and The Twentieth Century (2019). The Parr Professor
of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University she is the
cofounder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar and founder of the Humanities War and Peace Initiative
at Columbia. She is also the author of Modernism Male Friendship and the First World War
(2003) and At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (2012). Joshua
Glenn who was the first to describe the years 1900–1935 as science fiction’s Radium Age ” has
helped popularize stories from the era for over a decade now. A former Boston Globe staffer and
publisher of the indie intellectual journal Hermenaut he is coauthor of The Idler’s Glossary
(2008) Significant Objects (2012) and the family activities guide UNBORED (2012). He is also
cofounder of the brand consultancy Semiovox and he publishes the blogHiLobrow.
