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The World Set Free

by H. G. Wells

Category: Fiction

Status: Available

Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg

About This Book

"The World Set Free" by H. G. Wells is a novel written in 1913 and published in 1914. Wells envisions a devastating future war in 1956 where both sides wield atomic bombs—crude but continuously burning weapons that leave battlefields radioactive for years. As civilization collapses under nuclear destruction, humanity faces a choice: descend into barbarism or unite under a world government. The novel explores how uncontrolled atomic energy forces mankind to abandon the nation-state system and embrace global cooperation to survive. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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The World Set Free

by H.G. Wells

We Are All Things That Make And Pass, Striving Upon A Hidden Mission, Out To The Open Sea.

TO Frederick Soddy’s ‘Interpretation Of Radium’ This Story, Which Owes Long Passages To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book, Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself

Contents

PREFACE

The World Set Free was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few o

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About This Edition

This edition of The World Set Free by H. G. Wells is catalogued on Libreya under Fiction and runs approximately 65,019 words — about 325 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.

On Libreya, the text has been carefully formatted for comfortable reading on any screen — with consistent chapter navigation, adjustable font sizes, and four reading themes: light, sepia, dark, and night mode. Your reading position is saved automatically when you sign in, so you can pick up exactly where you left off across any device. The original text has not been altered in any way; what you read here is the same work as it appeared in its original published form.

About Classic Fiction

Classic fiction represents the highest achievements of literary imagination. The novels in this genre have shaped how generations of readers understand human nature, society, and the fundamental questions of existence. Reading 19th and early 20th-century novels offers far more than historical interest: these stories explore love, ambition, morality, and identity with an insight that remains startlingly relevant today. Authors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Hardy, and Dickens wrote for readers much like us — people trying to make sense of a complicated world — and their observations on class, relationships, power, and conscience carry across centuries with barely diminished force. Classic fiction is also where the novel as an art form reached some of its greatest heights: innovative narrative structures, deeply realized characters, and prose styles that reward slow, attentive reading. These are not museum pieces. They are living works that continue to be discussed, adapted, and argued over because they capture something essential and enduring about human experience.

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