When the Sleeper Wakes
1899
A radical pamphleteer from the 1890s, obsessed with the coming century and all its promises, takes a sleeping draught for his chronic insomnia and never wakes up. Not for two hundred years. When Graham finally opens his eyes, he finds himself the absolute master of a world he no longer recognizes: worshipped by millions, wealthiest of all humanity, his face plastered across the skyline of a London grown monstrous with progress. But the future he dreamed of has curdled into something darker than he imagined. The technology that was supposed to liberate has become a machine of control. The revolution he pined for has been reduced to a personality cult with his name on it. And not everyone who cheers for the Sleeper wishes him well. Wells, writing at the century's turn, saw further than he knew: this is one of the first great dystopian novels, a vision of modernity as nightmare, and a terrifying meditation on what happens when the future arrives and it's worse than you feared. For readers who love 1984 but want to trace its ancestry, or anyone who has ever woken up feeling like a stranger in their own time.
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“...fact takes no heed of human hopes.””
— H. G. Wells
“You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel”
— H. G. Wells
“After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.””
— H. G. Wells
“There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within--not without. It is each man's own affair.””
— H. G. Wells
“What right have they to hope? They work ill and they want the reward of those who work well. The hope of mankind - what is it? That some day the Over-man may come, that some day the inferior, the weak and the bestial may be subdued or eliminated. Subdued if not eliminated. The world is no place for the bad, the stupid, the enervated. Their duty - it's a fine duty too! - is to due. The death of the failure! That is the path by which the beast rose to manhood, by which man goes on to higher things.””
— H. G. Wells
“To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before”
— H. G. Wells
“The day of democracy is past," he said. "Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before”
— H. G. Wells
“Restraint, soberness, the matured thought, the unselfish act, they are necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is man's tribute to unconquered nature.””
— H. G. Wells
“I wonder," said Graham.Ostrog stared.Must the world go this way?" said Graham, with his emotions at the speaking point. "Must it indeedgo in this way? Have all our hopes been vain?"What do you mean?" said Ostrog. "Hopes?"I came from a democratic age. And I find an aristocratic tyranny!"Well,”
— H. G. Wells
