Dream: a novel

A man in a perfect future dreams a man's entire life, and wakes to find himself mourning a world of war, poverty, and heartbreak. Sarnac, living in a distant utopian society, experiences the full scope of Harry Mortimer Smith's existence: his loves, his losses, his small ambitions and quiet failures. What begins as curious entertainment becomes an unbearable reckoning with everything humanity thought it had outgrown. Wells constructs a future so serene it seems almost airless, then drops into it a dreamer who has seen the dark machinery of the old world. The novel asks what we owe to the past, and whether those who build paradises can ever truly forget the price of getting there. It is Wells at his most philosophical, using a simple premise to interrogate progress itself.