Radioactive decay
Dr. Griffin / The Invisible Man is a brilliant research scientist who discovers a method of invisibility, but finds himself unable to reverse the process. An enthusiast of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction. "The Island of Doctor Moreau" sees a shipwrecked man left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The earliest depiction of uplift, the novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature. In "The First Men in the Moon" Wells used the idea of radio communication between astronomical objects, a plot point inspired by Nikola Tesla's claim that he had received radio signals from Mars. Though "Tono-Bungay" is not a science-fiction novel, radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role in it. Radioactive decay plays a much larger role in "The World Set Free" (1914). This book contains what is surely his biggest prophetic "hit", with the first description of a nuclear weapon. Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The "rate" of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the "total amount" released is huge. Wells's novel revolves around an (unspecified) invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosives—but which "continue to explode" for days on end. "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century", he wrote, "than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands". In 1932, the physicist and conceiver of nuclear chain reaction Leó Szilárd read "The World Set Free" (the same year Sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron), a book which he said made a great impression on him. In addition to writing early science fiction, he produced work dealing with mythological beings like an angel in the novel "The Wonderful Visit" (1895) and a mermaid in the novel "The Sea Lady" (1902).