Novel: The Sleeper Awakes

Overview
H.G. Wells imagines a future London transformed by finance, spectacle, and mechanization, seen through the eyes of a man who sleeps for two centuries and wakes to find himself the legal owner of a world he does not understand. First published in 1899 as When the Sleeper Wakes and substantially revised in 1910 as The Sleeper Awakes, the novel blends political fable with technological prophecy. It follows the disorientation of a reluctant messiah whose fortune and symbolic power make him both a prize and a threat to the regimes that rule in his name.

Plot
Graham, a troubled insomniac from the late nineteenth century, abruptly collapses into a trance that lasts over 200 years. During his slumber, trustees invest his estate so successfully that compounding wealth concentrates vast ownership in his name; the authorities build an order around the absent figure they call the Sleeper. When he revives in a titanic, tiered London, he is hidden and manipulated by the oligarchy that has governed under his seal, only to be rescued by rebels who need his presence to ignite a popular rising. In the chaos, Graham becomes the nominal master of the world and turns to a formidable strategist, Ostrog, to stabilize the city and its empire.

Ostrog topples the old council with the Sleeper’s blessing, but quickly reveals a harsher despotism. He fortifies his rule with overwhelming police power and imported airmen, exploiting the very workers whose revolt had lifted him. As Graham learns the truth, about forced labor contracts, regimented pleasures, and engineered obedience, his conscience rebels. He takes to the skies in a swift aeroplane, rallying loyalists and challenging Ostrog’s air fleets above London in a climactic aerial battle. Graham’s bid to reclaim the authority used in his name ends in a desperate flight and a fall, leaving the social order unsettled and the moral reckoning unresolved.

World and Technology
Wells’ future city is a vertically stratified machine: moving roadways carry crowds past vast advertisements, glass-roofed arcades and theaters pacify the populace, and telephonic news and projected entertainments saturate attention. Air travel shrinks distances and turns war into a struggle for command of the sky. Property is abstracted into shares and trusts, allowing remote capital to govern daily life more firmly than any monarch. The crowd is both spectator and instrument, summoned by lights and voices to cheer, shop, or suppress, depending on who seizes the amplifiers.

Themes
The story is a study of power without understanding. Graham’s wealth, grown in his absence, becomes an apparatus that others operate, showing how capital can outlive and overrule human intention. The revolution that frees him is swiftly captured by a new elite, a pattern of upheaval yielding continuity in domination. Wells probes the seductions of modernity, speed, light, abundance, as tools of social control, turning leisure into discipline and novelty into narcotic. He anticipates mass media politics, financialized sovereignty, and aerial warfare, while warning that progress in means without progress in ends deepens inequality.

Legacy
The Sleeper Awakes stands among Wells’ sharpest dystopias, less a prophecy than a parable about custody of the future. Its images, moving ways, sky battles, omnipresent ads, and an absentee owner of the world, have echoed through later science fiction and political satire, shaping visions of technocratic power and the pliable crowd.