THE SLEEPER AWAKES
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The Sleeper Awakes is an 1899 dystopian science fiction novel by English writer H. G. Wells, about a man who sleeps for 203 years, waking up in a completely transformed late 21st to early 22nd century London in which he has become the richest man in the world. The main character awakes to see his dreams realised, and the future revealed to him in all its horrors and malformities.
The text published as The Sleeper Awakes in 1910 is a revised version of the novel When the Sleeper Wakes, which was published as a serial, then as a book, in 1899.
When the book was about to be reprinted again, Wells used this opportunity "to make a number of excisions and alterations", and changed its title to The Sleeper Awakes. As he explains in the preface of the 1910 edition, he was overworked and wrote under considerable pressure when he authored the original version simultaneously with another novel called Love and Mr. Lewisham, in addition to his journalistic obligations. Before going on a "badly needed holiday" to Italy, he felt he had to complete one of the two novels, and so rushed the ending on When the Sleeper Wakes just to finish it, hoping to return to it when he came back to England and before it went into print. But when he got home he fell seriously ill, and after forcing himself to complete Love and Mr. Lewisham, he never got the chance to do any rewriting of When the Sleeper Wakes before it was published.
What Wells disliked about it was the construction of the story and the rushed latter part. However, as so many years had passed, Wells claimed he could no longer identify with his younger self. As such, the work felt too remote for him to do any significant reconstruction. Instead he played the role of the "editorial elder brother" and cut some passages that felt redundant, improved certain "clumsy phrases and repetitions", straightened out some ambivalences at the end, and removed all signs of any love interest between characters. In the 1910 edition Wells also brought the 'flying machines' up to date.
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
$11.00