The World Set Free by H G Wells
Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2013 1:47 pm
Just finished this one.
It caught my interest when I saw that it describes a war fought with atomic bombs, and yet was written in 1914. It interested me to see how someone might think an atomic bomb would be like 31 years before the first one was actually detonated.
He got the technology wrong but he did accurately capture the devastation and horror that an atomic war would be. That said, most of the book is about the way the world reorganizes itself into a post-war utopia, and essentially reads like a treatise on forming a collective utopian society that leaves behind all the old notions of economics, nationalism and morality.
I found the ideas to be fairly naive but interesting. Vilification of those who didn't want to conform to the new utopia was not the least bit subtle and such characters were more like caricatures.
I enjoyed the way he predicted future technology would be. He wasn't very close to the reality, but it gives some good insights into the expectations of people who lived in the early 19th Century, for whom airplanes and cars were still a new technology. That part was fun.
It wasn't the most exciting book ever written but it did give me some things to think about, which is what I want the most from sci-fi.
It caught my interest when I saw that it describes a war fought with atomic bombs, and yet was written in 1914. It interested me to see how someone might think an atomic bomb would be like 31 years before the first one was actually detonated.
He got the technology wrong but he did accurately capture the devastation and horror that an atomic war would be. That said, most of the book is about the way the world reorganizes itself into a post-war utopia, and essentially reads like a treatise on forming a collective utopian society that leaves behind all the old notions of economics, nationalism and morality.
I found the ideas to be fairly naive but interesting. Vilification of those who didn't want to conform to the new utopia was not the least bit subtle and such characters were more like caricatures.
I enjoyed the way he predicted future technology would be. He wasn't very close to the reality, but it gives some good insights into the expectations of people who lived in the early 19th Century, for whom airplanes and cars were still a new technology. That part was fun.
It wasn't the most exciting book ever written but it did give me some things to think about, which is what I want the most from sci-fi.