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.
