Customer Reviews

Sleeper Awakes (Classics)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Science fiction fans simply looking for an entertaining story will want to skip this book. Its speculations, with a couple of exceptions, are dated -- Wells admitted such only ten years after it was written. The socialist values it expounds make one wonder whether Fabian Wells would have ever been satisfied with capitalism no matter what it did. The characters, again as Wells admitted, are Everyman and an implausible businessman villain.

And yet Wells kept playing with this story over 21 years. It also was probably quite influential on a young Robert Heinlein, a Wells admirer. (It has moving roadways amongst other things.)

The story? A man wakes up from a two hundred year coma to find out he's the richest man in the world. The capitalists who run this world hope he'll play along with them, continue to let them run the world using his money. But Sleeper Graham has other ideas and becomes a Socialist messiah to the oppressed.

Students of science fiction's history will recognize a plot with a starting point similar to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 -- to which Wells gives a nod. They'll also be interested in the understandably wrong predictions about aerial warfare. Students of Wells will definately want to read this, one of his second-tier works.

This book is a particularly good edition because it features a useful afterword noting the many changes Wells made in this story. It was first published as _When the Sleeper Wakes_, an 1899 magazine serial. It was changed for the book publication of the same year and further changed for the 1910 and 1921 editions.

A deeply burdened insomniac in nineteenth-century Great Britain falls into a great trance for where he does not awaken for 203 years. When he awakens, Graham, as he is known, finds himself in a twisted alternate reality in where laborers (one-third of the population) are treated as scum, where the entire numerical system is now in dozens, and with a hierarchical government, power rests only in the hands of a small dictatorship known as the Grand Council. Also, money has piled up and has been secured to make Graham the most powerful man on the earth and in all of human history. When Graham wakes up, he is shocked to find that the suppressed people have been praying for the "Sleeper" to wake, but also that the Grand Council has been planning his murder. However, he is saved by a group of resistance, lead by a man named Ostrog, whose objective is to expel the Grand Council out of power. Eventually, the Council is brought down to its knees. When Graham notices that the people are still oppressed, he tries to make the world turn back to democracy, but Ostrog strongly disagrees. The tension builds up, until Ostrog makes the order that the Black Police (from South Africa) are to maintain the order in England and throughout Europe, coming in aeroplanes. Graham cannot believe that he has been betrayed, as Ostrog had escaped earlier. Graham, who has had some flight experience, decides to pilot the only plane left, and goes down fighting, with the rest of the world and all of humankind with an unforeseeable future. The Sleeper Awakes, by H.G. Wells, is an excellent science-fiction novel because of three main qualities: its revolutionary science-fiction, its suspense, and its action.

When Graham awakens in the twenty-second century, he is immediately overwhelmed by the changes in this time then from the old Victorian period. Horse-drawn carriages are obsolete, and sidewalks are moving platforms in which everyone travels on. Also, books no longer exist, and there are holograms that show dramas and interpretations of life instead. The numerical system as we know has now been replaced by a twelve-number single-digit system. H.G. Wells is a fantastic science-fiction writer, in the fact that he wrote of airplanes eleven years before one ever flew, and fifteen years before any fought in battle.

Suspense has a prominent role in the Sleeper Awakes. When Graham was introduced to a room inside the Grand Council building, he was stranded for several days without any news from the outside. However, he hears a noise from the roof spaces above, and thinks that he sees a shadow. Then, blood drops from above, and splatters onto the carpet. The reader is on the edge of his seat, with the urge to find more answers. Several men come through the roof space, and the resistance begins.

The Sleeper Awakes takes place in a twisted, alternate future, in which the lower class is now beginning to rise against the affluent members of the higher classes. When Graham is taken by a resistance group to a local hall, members of the red police (security forces of the Grand Council), a large battle occurs. Laborers everywhere are fighting in the name of the "Sleeper", and the Red Police are trying to recapture him. The fighting gets so out-of-control that an entire skyscraper falls over onto its side, creating a massive explosion. Another intense sequence of action occurs when Graham is fighting in his monoplane, where he fights against the whole Black Police, where he comes to his demise, instead of living out the rest of his life unaccustomed this new world.

In the course of four days, Graham discovers a brand new world completely alien to him and his time in the 1890's. Even the "Sleeper" was not enough to hold off his enemies, as his monoplane crashes into the cold ground of the earth. This story does, however, renew the word science-fiction. The greatest reason that this novel should be read is that H.G. Wells had basically started the science-fiction genre, and we continue to read his classics today. The Sleeper Awakes should be read due to this and because of its futuristic setting, its thrills, and its many skirmishes throughout. I rate this novel five stars out of five.

A. Chappell

Oh, it gets off to the same start as "Looking Backward". Someone mysteriously falls into a sleep that lasts for two hundred years, and wakes up in a transformed world. After that, it's a whole different book.

In this case, the sleeper wakes not into a socialist world, but into a world wholly governed by property ownership - his. His original fortune, plus a few others, have ballooned due to compund interest. Currency consists of checks drawn on his account, passed back and forth in exchange for life's needs. His self-appointed estate managers are regents in all but name, and don't much like the idea of turning over the reins to He in Whose name they tyrranize the country.

But the ones who rescue him aren't much better. They seem to have invented the sound-bite, or Word as they call it (p.116), and want the sleeper only so they can replace the current oligarchy with their own, but under his name. Wells's cynicism appears elsewhere also, especially in anticipating religion as a commercial service, advertised like pantyhose. Once you start seeing prescient passages in this book, it's hard to stop. Wells anticipated moving sidewalks, air war (a decade before the first airplane), and even a form of internet addiction. Although the details differ, "to live outside the range of electric cables [including phone and video] was to live a savage."

The editors have added overy thirty pages of biography, bibliography, and scholarly analysis of Wells's different editions of this text, plus at least 15 pages of endnotes. Perhaps this material will interest the specialized reader, but I am not that specialist. Wells's text, for my taste, doesn't need the help. It does, however, cement his reputation as a social critic and seer.

-- wiredweird

H. G. Wells is one of the pioneers of science fiction and probably one of the most influential authors of that genre. An argument can be made that almost any contemporary science fiction theme (alien invasion, time travel, biological manipulation, technology gone awry, dystopian future societies) can in one way or another be traced back to an H. G. Wells novel.

A big part of H. G. Wells' appeal, as is the case with all good science fiction, comes from the fact that the stories he wrote were not primarily (or even predominantly) designed to titillate with speculation of novel technologies, or space aliens, or any other sensationalist image. His stories explore many of out most fundamental desires and fears, and they all had a significant dose of social criticism. This is one of the main reasons why his stories are still read today and have for the most part aged remarkably well.

Nowhere is the fact of timelessness of Wells' fiction better illustrated than in "The Sleeper Awakes." This is a short novel about a nineteen century Englishman who falls in a deep sleep only to awake over two hundred years later. The World has changed beyond recognition, and "The Sleeper" finds himself in a remarkable predicament - he has become the owner of the entire planet. This state of affairs was made possible because no one really expected him to wake up, so for the most part his ownership of all the World's resources was thought only to be nominal. However, his awakening profoundly shakes this state of affairs, and he suddenly finds himself at the very center of revolutionary social upheavals and a struggle for the ultimate power. This struggle is the main focus of the larger part of the novel.

"The Sleeper Awakes" at a first sight seems to have some resemblance to Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, but it is a much darker tale. (It is certainly a far cry from Woody Allen's ridiculous comedy adaptation "Sleeper"). Wells expects the future society on the one hand to be a very advanced and a highly desirable place to live, but it also has a much darker and more sinister side to it. This utopia/dystopia dichotomy is the source of tension in the novel, and it also provides very effective rationale for the plot advancement. The theme of sleeper has a lot of strong resonances with both Arthurian legends and the basic tenants of Christianity. It is to Wells' credit that he manages to tap into those subjects in a subtle way that its does not force itself on the reader. In fact, Wells' writing is overall of the very high quality. He was mindful to write good literature, and not just entertaining stories for mass consumption.

There are a few futuristic ideas in this novel that seem silly and naïve in retrospect, but they in no way detract from the main story. The reader should also be mindful of the fact that some of the attitudes that Wells exhibits in this novel might be considered bigoted today, but in this respect he was just a product of his own age. With these caveats in mind, "The Sleeper Awakes" is a very interesting and thought-provoking novel that should appeal to anyone who is interested in serious vintage science fiction.

This isn't one of the most famous books in Well's canon, lacking the classic status awarded to books like War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man. The Sleeper Awakes is a good book, though not one on par with those works. It drags in some places, but is on the whole interesting for it's fairly unique (for the time; like many Wells novels, this has a central plotline that has been re-done by many a faceless SF author since.) Also, the vision of the future presented here is an interesting and slightly novel one, which Wells himself, in the introduction, admits to being one that will almost certainly never come to pass, which makes this book's warning not as clear as say, 1984's or Fahrenheit 451's, but is nevertheless notable. Thus, the novel is entertaining, and, in spots, fast-paced. Recommended for the Wells fan, newcomers to the father of science fiction should start elsewhere.

In the past year, I've torn through H.G. Wells books. His style is immensely readable, his vision prophetic, and his outlook cynical with a ray of hope. I love "The Island of Dr. Moreau," "The First Men in the Moon," and "War of the Worlds," all great storytelling mixed with strong themes. In "The Sleeper Awakes," also titled "When the Sleeper Awakes," we find a theme-heavy book that doesn't quite live up to his usual yarn-spinning. Nevertheless, it's worth the read for those who love Wells' work and/or dystopian literature.

The book introduces us to Graham, a man suffering from insomnia. We get a sly reference to the fact that the War of the Worlds has already occurred (and, indeed, it was the book written just before this one), and so there is a hint that man's struggles with extra-terrestrials now lead us back to man's struggle with man. In his quest for sleep, Graham ends up in experimental treatment that locks him in slumber for the next two centuries. When he awakes, he is in the year 2100 (if counting from the time Wells wrote the book). Art has given way to commerce. Education is about amusement. Technology has given new ways to hold down the masses, through the threat of aeroplanes. Religion and reverence are on the down-slide, and stock markets and traders are the new power-mongers. "For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world."

Graham discovers that he is now the world's richest man, due to his interest-gaining bank funds, and he is master of the world. This seeming ascendance is challenged, though, by his own ignorance of the world he is now in, and by a puppet-master named Ostrog who believes in a new aristocracy in which "wealth now is power as it never was before," and "the common man now is a helpless unit." This is not the classless society Graham envisioned, and he sets out to find out more by exploring the streets of London and meeting those under his tenuous rule. He is driven, in particular, by his relationship with a young woman from the streets, one who speaks of a revolution.

When Wells uses dialogue and action, the story takes flight. When he lapses into long tours of the streets and the new order, he gets wordy and ponderous, but there are nuggets to be found. It's a cautionary tale. It's a visionary tale. He makes some strange racial remarks about "the negroes," and in the conclusion its a force of Ostrog's black men who threaten London. But Wells does point out: "Is it not an older sin, a wider sin? . . . These blacks have been under the rule of the white two hundred years. Is it not a race quarrel? The race sinned--the race pays."

"The Sleeper Awakes" is a precursor to such great dystopian visions as "Brave New World," "Fahrenheit 451," and "1984." In many ways, these stories mirror each other, and while "The Sleeper Awakes" is not as strong on the entertainment and storytelling, it is clearly a foundation for many novels that came later.

It was all right... just all right. Some of the ideas stated were interesting and even prophetic, like the harnessing of wind power for electricity. Some parts reminded me of Fahrenheit 451.

The greatest disappointment was the ending. I was expecting Wells to use the story's build-up to say something clever and meaningful regarding the state of humanity, along with perhaps some useful suggestions, even if unfeasible. But it just ended in an unsatisfying way, almost as if he suddenly got tired of it and wanted to work on something else.

This is not a good "Wells starter book" -- The Time Machine is far better -- but as a study in fiction styles it is all right.

In 1897 a gentlemen falls asleep to wake up in 2100. In the future he finds himself owner of much of the world as his money, which grew while he slept, was used to take over the world by buying up all businesses and property. Now the "Sleeper" finds himself in the middle of a power struggle between those who have and those who have not.

The characters are bland, the future feels like a false front, like one of those towns used in a Wild West movie, and even after pages and pages of details everything still seems vague. I can't picture much of what he writes about as he seems to skim over scenes, leaving out details, and shooting ahead to what parts of the story he believes are important.

His idea about cities of the future, while interesting, is not interesting enough to carry a whole plot.

The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells. Published by MobileReference (mobi).

A deeply burdened insomniac in nineteenth-century Great Britain falls into a great trance for 203 years. When he awakens in the twenty-second century, he is immediately overwhelmed by the changes. In the course of four days he discovers a brand new world completely alien to him.