How long does it take to read The World Set Free?
a story of mankind
H. G. Wells, Ellen Marriage
The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, Ellen Marriage takes about 4 hours 24 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 24 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1914. 240 pages, about 66,000 words.
9 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 20 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 24 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 45 minutes |
The page count is the median across 236 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
H. G. Wells's novel, published in 1914, imagines a future shaped by humanity's growing command of energy. Scientists in the early twentieth century wonder whether the energy locked inside radioactive elements can be released, and in the story a researcher named Holsten solves the problem. The result is a new kind of bomb that keeps exploding for days. A war breaks out in 1956 with both sides armed with these weapons. Wells uses this premise to argue that war grows ever easier to wage, and that a divided world must choose between collapse and a new social order.
This summary was written by AI and checked by a second AI model. How these are chosen.
Subjects: Nuclear warfare, Imaginary wars and battles, Fiction, Fiction, action & adventure, Fiction, science fiction, general, Long now manual for civilization
