"H.G.Wells. The World Set Free" - читать интересную книгу автора

us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off
until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason
for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a
prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to
be rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of
reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about
twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical
reader's sense of use and wont and perhaps a less creditable
disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating
forward of one's main events, but in the particular case of The
World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the
Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well
forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.
1956--or for that matter 2056--may be none too late for that
crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this
procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening
phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of
the Central Empires, the opening campaign through the
Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force
were all justified before the book had been published six months.
And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after
the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the
essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second,
Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the
forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite
impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and
concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There
could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is
here foretold.

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story
far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of
interest now; the thesis that because of the development of
scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate
sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to
attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon
disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether.
The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity
of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war
on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to
break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind.
I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and
of the English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be
'God's Englishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute
effort of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the
school book footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead
of a frank and honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman
meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences
and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in