The First World War is often alluded to as “the war to end all wars,” a phrase credited to H. G. Wells at the outbreak of the conflict. Rather than a self-proclaimed product of war enthusiasm in 1914, his declaration represented a consistent vision of warfare that Wells circulated in much of his work: that a major war would cause the collapse of the nation state and facilitate the rise of a utopian, technocratic world state. Although partly a cultural product of his own times, Wells mythologized himself as a misfit in all times: a sociopolitical critic antithetical to the madness of his own society. This study asserts that rather than an attempt at prophecy, it is this misfit image that informed his declaration in 1914 and societal responses to it.