In Question 7, Flanagan traces connections between events in history and his personal family history. He draws together seemingly disparate elements such as the work of H. G. Wells, the creation of the atomic bomb, his father’s time as a POW, British colonialism in Tasmania, and his own life to show how historical events connect in unexpected ways. To illustrate this concept, Flanagan uses an extended metaphor of a chain reaction where a nucleus splits into two nuclei that in turn triggers another nucleus to split into two nuclei and so forth. Similarly, in Flanagan’s telling, a historical event triggers myriad other events that in turn ripple across space and time.

Flanagan builds the chain reaction motif into the structure of the text itself. He notes how H. G. Wells’s description of the atomic bomb in The World Set Free inspired scientists and policymakers like Winston Churchill. It also resonated with Wells’s “disciple” the physicist Leo Szilard. He was so shocked by what he read that he felt the United States should develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. He feared that if Germany got the bomb before the U.S., there would be a nuclear apocalypse.