* * * * * [Illustration: _Hotel Waiter._ "Come, sir, you really must go off to bed, Sir." (_Yawns_). "Why, the dawn's a-breaking, Sir." _Late Reveller._ "Let it break--and put it down in the bill, waiter."] * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerics._) In _The World Set Free_ (Macmillan) Mr. H. G. Wells has seen a vision--the vision of a world plunged into blazing and crumbling chaos by the ultimate logical issues of military violence. Defence, becoming always less and less effective against attack, which is always more and more a matter of the laboratory, finally succumbs before _Holsten's_ discovery of "Carolinum" and its final disastrous application in the "atomic bombs." Romancing on a theme out of Soddy's _Interpretation of Radium_, Mr. Wells, with those deft strokes of allusive and imaginative realism--so convincing is he that realism is the only apt word for his daring constructions of the future--depicts the shattering of the headquarters of the War Control in Paris, followed by a swift counterstroke against the Central European Control in Berlin by the aviation corps, the destruction of capital after capital, and the final great battle in the air, with the bombing of the Dutch sea walls. Thereafter comes the attempt at reconstruction by the Council of Brissago, a convention of the governing folk of the world--the dream and deed of the Frenchman _Leblanc_, "a little bald, spectacled man," a peacemonger whom, till that day of ruin, everyone had thought an amiable fool. One monarch, "The Slavic Fox," sees in the assembly a chance to strike for world sovereignty, and the failure of his bomb-fraught planes and his final undoing in the secret arsenal are breathless pieces of description. A subject for wonder is the astonishing advance in the author's technique. _The World Set Free_ is on an altogether different plane from _The War of the Worlds_ and those other gorgeous pot-boilers. It combines the alert philosophy and adroit criticism of the _Tono Bungay_ phase with the luminous vision of _Anticipations_ and the romantic interest of his eccentric books of adventure. The seer in Mr. Wells comes uppermost, and I almost think that when the history of the latter half of the twentieth century comes to be written it will be found not merely that he has prophesied surely, but that his visions have actually tended to shape the course of events. Short of _Holsten's_ "atomic bombs" (which may or may not be developed) Mr. Wells makes a fair foreshadowing of the uprush of subliminal sanity which may very well be timed to appear before 1999. I can't take my hat off to Mr. Wells because I've had it in my hand out of respect for him these last few years. So I touch my forelock. * * * * *