Metaphorosis Reviews
Written on Mar 29, 2024
Summary
From the perspective of 1913, Wells imagines an alternate future that goes through a hell of atomic war but ends up with local democracy, a world government, and productive, contented citizens.
Review
Much as Robert Heinlein’s, For Us, the Living was a loose story framework intended to showcase socio-economic essays, Wells’ The World Set Free is less novel than thought experiment. Broken into six sections, it sets up a world of atomic power in which, fumblingly and loosely, well-intentioned leaders set the world on a more constructive path.
Not all is resolved. In the final pages, a philosopher argues with two women about gender, with the former wanting to abolish most gender distinctions and the latter uncomfortable. And the new world council, while posited to work, is described as a haphazard, rather ramshackle, and entirely undemocratic affair. This is not utopia, but there are certainly utopian elements. At last, humans are free to bring their creativity to the fore, there is local democracy (if not global), and people are broadly happy and prosperous.
Wells, while admitting the flaws of his broad concept of governance, elides almost all of the essential elements of how it would work. Atomic power, initially a terrible instrument of war, resolves our problems almost without effort. World leaders willingly give up power – though remain in charge. There’s a good deal of wish fulfillment here, if tempered with realism.
In fact, Wells seems to simply be sketching out one possibility for how the world could progress – one path through which, despite ourselves, we could succeed. It’s a somewhat interesting if not very convincing story, and it ends very abruptly.
Wells’ book is in some ways a better story that Heinlein’s. It’s more cohesive and makes more pretense at narrative. It covers a similarly long time period, but walks us through it, with a few recurring, sequential characters. All the same, it’s impossible to mistake this for an actual novel – it’s much too directed and didactic for that. It’s also fairly Euro-centric, but not terribly so.
The preface, added much later, admits to error. Wells, in 1913, mis-predicted the start of World War I by decades. And he pointedly regrets the lack of a unifying, world government-creating figure in the real world. But he does get right a number of things that could have grown into the world he envisions. The League of Nations, apocalyptic power of nuclear weapons, suffrage, gender equality, the potential (still unrealized now) of the single transferable vote. All these are things might have worked out differently, and it’s hard to argue that our world is better than the one Wells imagines. His war is worse, but we’ve had many more, with less to show for it.
All in all, an interesting if fairly dry read.