Other editions of book The Illustrated Sleeper Awakes: 100th Anniversary Edition

raham, an Englishman living in London in 1897 takes drugs to cure insomnia and falls into a coma. He wakes up in 2100. He later learns that he has inherited huge wealth and that his money has been put into a trust. Over the years, the trustees, the "White Council", have used his wealth to establish a vast political and economic world order.When he wakes Graham is disoriented. The people around him had not expected him to wake up, and are alarmed. Word spreads that the "Sleeper" has awakened. A mob gathers around the building and demands to see the fabled Sleeper. The people around Graham will not answer his questions. They place Graham under house arrest. Graham learns that he is the legal owner and master of most of the world.Rebels led by Ostrog help Graham to escape. They say that the people need Graham's leadership to rise against the White Council. Unconvinced, but unwilling to remain a prisoner, Graham goes with them. Graham arrives at a massive hall where the workers have gathered to prepare for the revolution. They march against the White Council but are soon attacked by the state police. In the confusion, Graham is separated from the revolutionaries. He meets an old man who tells him the story of the Sleeper - the White Council invested his wealth to buy the industries and political entities of half the world, establishing a plutocracy and sweeping away parliament and the monarchy. The Sleeper is just a figurehead. The old man thinks that the Sleeper is a made-up figure used to brainwash the population.

The Sleeper Awakes is a dystopian science fiction novel by English writer H. G. Wells, about a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed 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 novel is a rewritten version of When the Sleeper Wakes, a story by Wells that was serialised between 1898 and 1899.

Dystopian Science Fiction, Alternate History“Is it true indeed, that I have been asleep two hundred—?” asked Graham.“They have told you that, have they? Two hundred and three, as a matter of fact.”Graham accepted the indisputable now with raised eyebrows and depressed mouth. He sat silent for a moment, and then asked a question, “Is there a mill or dynamo near here?” He did not wait for an answer. “Things have changed tremendously, I suppose?” he said.“What is that shouting?” he asked abruptly.“Nothing,” said the thickset man impatiently. “It’s people. You’ll understand better later—perhaps. As you say, things have changed.” He spoke shortly, his brows were knit, and he glanced about him like a man trying to decide in an emergency. “We must get you clothes and so forth, at any rate. Better wait here until some can come. No one will come near you. You want shaving.”Graham rubbed his chin.The man with the flaxen beard came back towards them, turned suddenly, listened for a moment, lifted his eyebrows at the older man, and hurried off through the archway towards the balcony. The tumult of shouting grew louder, and the thickset man turned and listened also. He cursed suddenly under his breath, and turned his eyes upon Graham with an unfriendly expression. It was a surge of many voices, rising and falling, shouting and screaming, and once came a sound like blows and sharp cries, and then a snapping like the crackling of dry sticks. Graham strained his ears to draw some single thread of sound from the woven tumult.Then he perceived, repeated again and again, a certain formula. For a time he doubted his ears. But surely these were the words: “Show us the Sleeper! Show us the Sleeper!”The thickset man rushed suddenly to the archway.“Wild!” he cried, “How do they know? Do they know? Or is it guessing?”There was perhaps an answer.“I can’t come,” said the thickset man; “I have him to see to. But shout from the balcony.”There was an inaudible reply.“Say he is not awake. Anything! I leave it to you.”He came hurrying back to Graham. “You must have clothes at once,” he said. “You cannot stop here—and it will be impossible to—”He rushed away, Graham shouting unanswered questions after him. In a moment he was back.“I can’t tell you what is happening. It is too complex to explain. In a moment you shall have your clothes made. Yes—in a moment. And then I can take you away from here. You will find out our troubles soon enough.”“But those voices. They were shouting—?”“Something about the Sleeper—that’s you. They have some twisted idea. I don’t know what it is. I know nothing.”A shrill bell jetted acutely across the indistinct mingling of remote noises, and this brusque person sprang to a little group of appliances in the corner of the room. He listened for a moment, regarding a ball of crystal, nodded, and said a few indistinct words; then he walked to the wall through which the two men had vanished. It rolled up again like a curtain, and he stood waiting.Graham lifted his arm and was astonished to find what strength the restoratives had given him. He thrust one leg over the side of the couch and then the other. His head no longer swam. He could scarcely credit his rapid recovery. He sat feeling his limbs...

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"When the Sleeper Wakes" is a dystopian novel by British author H. G. Wells, first published in serial form in The Graphic between 1899 and 1903. In 1910, Wells expanded the story into the full-length novel "The Sleeper Awakes", published by Harper & Brothers."The Sleeper Awakes" is a fantastic Dystopian tale about Graham, an 1890s radical pamphleteer who is eagerly awaiting the twentieth century and all the advances it will bring and who is stricken with insomnia. Finally resorting to medication, he instantly falls into a deep sleep that lasts two hundred years. Upon waking in the twenty-second century to a strange and nightmarish place, he slowly discovers he is master of the world, revered by an adoring populace who consider him their leader. Terrified, he escapes from his chamber seeking solace—only to realise that not everyone adores him, some even wish to harm him.The novel is his version of the familiar trope of the man who falls asleep for an unnaturally long period of time and wakes up in a future where everything has changed, where a new civilisation is in place.Invariably, the civilisation of the future is shown to have either solved or exacerbated what the author sees as the great social issues of his own day so that the genre offers an author free rein to make prophecies and predictions, as well as working in as much social and political satire, as he or she wants.Wells had joined the left-wing Fabian Society in 1903 and had quickly become one of its most famous publicists and promoters. By 1910 his views on politics and society were well-known and the 1910 version of the book brings these out more clearly, as well as trying to sort out infelicities in the writing.

In the dystopian vision of H. G. Wells' novel The Sleeper Awakes (1910), a man awakes to a London where all he knew has radically changed after his sleep of two hundred and three years. Due to the wonders of compound interest, he is now this later world's richest man. As a committed socialist and futurist, he now sees his dreams realized and revealed to him in all their abhorrent and frightful glory.

A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. During his centuries of slumber, however, investments are made that make him the richest and most powerful man on Earth. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover that the money accumulated in his name is being used to maintain a hierarchal society in which most are poor, and more than a third of all people are enslaved. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream - that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.