The Sleeper Awakes

"When the Sleeper Wakes" is a dystopian novel by British author H. G. Wells, first published in serial form in The Graphic between 1899 and 1903. In 1910, Wells expanded the story into the full-length novel "The Sleeper Awakes", published by Harper & Brothers.

"The Sleeper Awakes" is a fantastic Dystopian tale about Graham, an 1890s radical pamphleteer who is eagerly awaiting the twentieth century and all the advances it will bring and who is stricken with insomnia. Finally resorting to medication, he instantly falls into a deep sleep that lasts two hundred years. Upon waking in the twenty-second century to a strange and nightmarish place, he slowly discovers he is master of the world, revered by an adoring populace who consider him their leader. Terrified, he escapes from his chamber seeking solace—only to realise that not everyone adores him, some even wish to harm him.

The novel is his version of the familiar trope of the man who falls asleep for an unnaturally long period of time and wakes up in a future where everything has changed, where a new civilisation is in place.

Invariably, the civilisation of the future is shown to have either solved or exacerbated what the author sees as the great social issues of his own day so that the genre offers an author free rein to make prophecies and predictions, as well as working in as much social and political satire, as he or she wants.

Wells had joined the left-wing Fabian Society in 1903 and had quickly become one of its most famous publicists and promoters. By 1910 his views on politics and society were well-known and the 1910 version of the book brings these out more clearly, as well as trying to sort out infelicities in the writing.