H. G. Wells thought Nature less trustworthy when he read similar statements in Soddy’s 1909 book Interpretation of Radium. “My idea is taken from Soddy,” he wrote of The World Set Free. “One of the good old scientific romances,” he called his novel; it was important enough to him that he interrupted a series of social novels to write it.150 Rutherford’s and Soddy’s discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.
