The world of dystopian literature is one I highly recommend. It offers a rich opportunity for analysis and thought experiment. H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes does not offer such an opportunity.
Dystopian literature—dystopia being the opposite of utopia—typically offers a bleak view of the future. Ordinarily, the ills and maladies of today have been “fixed.” But the cure offers something maybe worse than the disease. People in dystopian societies are commonly drones living in a kind of totalitarian system.
Classics of the genre include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. There are many others. And film jumped aboard the genre. Dystopian films can be found across the history of cinema, from movies like Metropolis (1927) to the Matrix (1999). Needless to say, there is much to explore here.
I recommend the Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury novels. I do not recommend H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes. It is unclear and unenjoyable. His writing is quite poor (is he being arty?); I never felt I had a sense of the various spaces he describes. And I never found it pleasurable. I strained to even finish the book. “Fifty more pages … [sigh]”
Oh also—it’s racist. There are numerous instances of anti-black racist stereotypes throughout the novel. Yes, it was published in 1899. But there is even mention of “archaic prejudice” during a scene in the future. And then the book proceeds to traffic in just that. A poor showing, Herbert George.
The basic story is a man falls into a cataleptic trance in Victorian England and wakes up over two centuries later. Over this time, he has accrued a massive fortune. When he awakes, he is hailed as “the owner of the world.”
Of course, he presents a threat to the power elite in that society, so the novel centers around the tensions between Graham and the leadership of this new world. The concept is interesting, and the novel could have been much more than it is. It takes about half the book for anything to happen. And I have already mentioned the writing, which is exhausting.
It might have been one of the first of its kind, but it certainly is not one of the best.
https://www.amazon.com/SLEEPER-AWAKES-WELLS-H-PAPERBACK/dp/B0092G6OYO
