The Sleeper Awakes

by H.G. Wells. Edited with an Introduction by Colin Heston.

What if you fell asleep—and awoke more than two hundred years later to discover that you owned the world?

Graham, an exhausted nineteenth-century man, falls into a mysterious cataleptic trance. When at last he awakens, London has become an immense mechanized metropolis of moving walkways, towering structures, mass communications and flying machines. But the greatest shock is not technological. During his extraordinary sleep, Graham's modest fortune has multiplied through compound interest until he has become the richest man alive—and, at least in name, the Master of the World.

Yet ownership is not power. Graham discovers that a ruling Council has governed in his name while millions of ordinary people live under a rigid system of economic and political control. His awakening threatens the entire structure. Revolution erupts, and Graham is forced to choose between the calculating Ostrog, who believes the masses must be controlled, and a population determined to overthrow its masters.

First published in 1899 as When the Sleeper Wakes, Wells substantially revised the novel in 1910 under the title The Sleeper Awakes. He removed much of the original romantic subplot, tightened the later chapters, reconsidered the story's flying machines, and gave the struggle between rulers and ruled a darker and more ambiguous conclusion.

More than a century later, Wells's vision remains startling. Concentrated wealth, manipulation of public opinion, mass entertainment, technological surveillance, economic inequality and political elites who claim to know what is best for the people make The Sleeper Awakes one of the great precursors of modern dystopian fiction.

This new Read-Me.Org edition presents Wells's revised text, newly reset and lightly corrected for typographical consistency, while retaining the language and character of the original. It also includes a new Introduction by Colin Heston and five public-domain period illustrations by Henri Lanos, the celebrated illustrator of the original 1899 publication.

For readers of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and other classics of speculative and dystopian fiction, The Sleeper Awakes reveals H. G. Wells not merely as a prophet of technology, but as a remarkably prescient critic of wealth, power and the politics of the modern mass society.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 174p.