The World Set Free is a novel written in 1913 and published in 1914 by H. G. Wells.^[1] The book is based on a prediction of a more destructive and uncontrollable sort of weapon than the world has yet seen.^[2][3][4] It had appeared first in serialised form with a different ending as A Prophetic Trilogy, consisting of three books: A Trap to Catch the Sun, The Last War in the World and The World Set Free.^[5]

The book was read by Leo Szilard in 1932 and aided his conception of the actual nuclear bomb.

A frequent theme of Wells's work, as in his 1901 nonfiction book Anticipations, was the history of humans' mastery of power and energy through technological advance, seen as a determinant of human progress. The novel begins: "The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. ... Always down a lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more."^[6] (Many of the ideas Wells develops here found a fuller development when he wrote The Outline of History in 1918–1919.) The novel is dedicated "To Frederick Soddy's Interpretation of Radium", a volume published in 1909.^[7]

The war takes place in 1956, with both sides possessing nuclear weapons.^[8]

Scientists of the time were well aware that the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and that while the rate of energy release is negligible, the total amount released is huge. Wells used this as the basis for his story. In his fiction,

Wells's knowledge of atomic physics came from reading books by William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy; the last discovered the disintegration of uranium. Soddy's book Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt praises The World Set Free.

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian a generation younger than Wells, grew up reading and enjoying the works of Wells, both fiction and nonfiction, and became a nuclear physicist. In 1929 he met Wells, who urged him to discover new sources of energy which could bring humankind to the stars. The question occupied Szilard's thoughts in the years thereafter, and in 1932 he read and was disturbed by The World Set Free.^[19] The following year, Szilard saw a newspaper article in which Rutherford dismissed the idea that particle acceleration could ever generate energy. Szilard was irritated by Rutherford's arrogant rejection of the future of a yet undeveloped field, and a few days later, while on a walk, the idea of nuclear chain reaction came to him.^[20] He filed for a patent on the mechanism in 1934, but remembering The World Set Free, treated the subject cautiously. In a volume published in 1968, Szilard wrote: "Knowing what [a chain reaction] would mean—and I knew because I had read H.G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public."^[21]

• archive.org (sign up to access material): The World Set Free
• The Shape of Things to Come
• The World State
• Dirty bomb

• The World Set Free at Standard Ebooks
• The World Set Free at Project Gutenberg
• The World Set Free at the Internet Archive
• The World Set Free public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• The World Set Free, a story of mankind, by H. G. Wells, 1914. (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)