A Story of Mankind
The World Set Free A Story of Mankind
Macmillan, 1914.
First edition. Original blind stamped green cloth, lettered in gilt, in the rare dustwrapper. Top edge gilt. An excellent, fine and bright copy, in a near fine dustwrapper, lightly toned to the spine and edges, with a short closed tear to the head of the lower joint.
First published serially in The English Review, though with a different ending, from December 1913 to May 1914, The World Set Free is the final part of what Wells considered his trilogy of "fantasias of possibility", preceded by The War In The Air (1908) and When The Sleeper Wakes (1899).
The novel is notable for Wells's prediction of the nuclear bomb, where he describes "long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action." Leo Szilard, who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, later wrote in his memoir of that conception "knowing what it would mean - and I knew because I had read HG Wells - I did not want this patent to become public."
Wells 51.
Stock ID: 37538
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