Wells's forgotten classic.

HG Wells is perhaps one of the best-known English authors of the late nineteenth century. Along with his contemporary Jules Verne, he laid the groundwork for the genre that is now known as science-fiction, and wrote some of that genre’s most famous novels. However, When the Sleeper Wakes is not one of them. Before I proceed further, I should perhaps reiterate that it was the original version of When the Sleeper Wakes that I am reviewing here, and not the revised version. The novel was originally serialised in The Graphic magazine over 1898-99. It was then published, with some revisions and tightening of the text, in novel form in 1899, and this is the version I am discussing now. The reason for a third revision coming into being was that in 1908, Wells agreed with his publishers to write another novel set in the future. However, he was unable to complete the project and partly in order to satisfy his contract and partly because he had never been happy with the original, Wells offered the publishers instead a revised version of When the Sleeper Wakes. This they agreed to, and in 1910 it was published under the new title The Sleeper Awakes. This revised version replaced the original in all print runs until 1994 (with the exception of a single edition published by Collins in 1929, but under the title The Sleeper Awakes). Happily, we can now enjoy the original version again.

There are several reasons as to why When the Sleeper Wakes is not nearly as well known as many of Wells’ other novels. Firstly, it is somewhat overshadowed by the novels that were written immediately before and after it, the genre-defining masterpiece The War of the Worlds and, foreshadower of the Apollo missions, The First Men in the Moon. Secondly, as time has gone by, it has become less and less relevant, as many of the technical developments predicted within the book, while they may well have seemed remarkable in 1899, have nearly all been superseded by 2000, still one hundred years before the book is set. We are therefore less convinced that this is what life could be like in the year 2100, and a realistic setting, one not totally out of the bounds of possibility, is something that is vitally important for the success of such novels. And thirdly, despite Wells’ high calibre writing, it is simply a below par effort when compared to his other books, as he showed himself by writing a revised version, indicating that he was never truly happy with the original version.

When the Sleeper Wakes is set for the most part in the year 2100, as stated above. However, unlike the majority of other ‘speculative fiction’ works, it is not set entirely in that time period, as the opening two chapters are set in the years 1897 and 1917, forming almost a short prologue to the main story. This presents readers, or rather presented the readers of Wells’ time, with a familiar environment and set of people, so that there would be much more of a contrast with Wells’ depiction of the way of life in 2100.

The novel tells the story of Graham, whose second name we are never told of. Graham is a citizen of the year 1897, a young Victorian gentleman who has been greatly overworking himself and is suffering from insomnia. He is contemplating suicide when he is found by a passing stranger, Mr. Isbister. Isbister takes Graham back to his lodgings, where he suddenly falls into a deep, death-like trance. Twenty years later, in 1917, Isbister and Warming, a cousin of Graham’s, are looking over his sleeping form, which has not aged a day since the trance began. Warming says that he will never wake.

It is in this second chapter of the book, clearly set in the year 1917, that one of the book’s first seemingly accurate predictions is made. Isbister and Warming are talking over Graham’s sleeping form about all of the events that have passed while he has been asleep. “‘And there’s been the War’ said Isbister,” can only be seen from a 2000 perspective as a reference to World War One, which took place 1914-18. As this passage was written in 1898, however, this line can only be put down to pleasing coincidence, which nevertheless lends the book some unexpected authenticity.

However, in 2100, Graham does awaken, to find that he is the most powerful person in the world. Isbister and Warming set up a trust fund to look after Graham’s affairs, and as they both died heirless they left their considerable fortunes to him. With careful investment by a body of experts set up to govern Graham’s affairs and huge compound interest, Graham now owns the majority of the world’s fortune. When Graham awakes, he finds himself at the centre of a power struggle between the Council (who were the guardians of his estate while he slept) and the people, led by the revolutionary figure of Ostrog. Ostrog and Graham overthrow the Council, but Ostrog is power-crazed and is using Graham as merely a figurehead for his own ambitions. Graham starts a counter-revolution against Ostrog, and succeeds in overthrowing him, but is killed in an aerial battle to defend London against forces Ostrog has called up from Africa.

After Graham has awoken and been informed that he has been asleep for 203 years, he and the reader are presented with a plethora of confusing and jumbled sequences before he is locked in a comfortable apartment for three days while the ruling council puzzle out what to do now he has awoken, an eventuality which they clearly never expected.

While on his own, Graham discovered what we would these days call a video player, Wells idea of a modern day replacement for a novel. It is during this short sequence that three of the book’s most astoundingly accurate predictions occur. Firstly, Graham looks through the collection of videos available and finds The Man Who Would be King. He then finds two others, one of which is called The Heart of Darkness, which he concludes, “no doubt if they were stories, they were by post Victorian authors.” Conrad’s Heart of Darkness did not appear until 1901, and I do not believe that Wells knew Conrad, and even if he did, would Conrad have had the idea for the book as far back as 1898?

Secondly, Graham concludes that the video player “had fixed the language so that it was still clear and understandable after two hundred years.” This is something that is apparent today, the English language is developing more slowly now that it has been standardised by the media.

Although here Wells’ establishes that the spoken language of the time is understandable English, the written form is different. When Graham is looking through the video collection to start with, he is puzzled by a label which reads “oi Man huwdbi Kin,” which he eventually discerns is “phonetic spelling.” So the written form has changed, if not the spoken.

Thirdly and most importantly, Wells’ fairly accurately manages to predict the differing moral standards of the modern time. Graham becomes curious and places another videotape in the machine, but this time his reaction is less favourable.

“The story developed with a flavour of strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked it less as it proceeded. He had a revulsion of feeling. These were no pictures, no idealisations, but photographed realities... He rose, angry and half ashamed at himself for witnessing this thing even in solitude.”

This is clearly something that a Victorian gentleman would find deeply shocking, and the only interpretation can be that Graham was watching pornography. Not perhaps full on hard-core stuff, but more likely the softer sex scenes we see in many films and TV dramas these days, which would still be totally unacceptable to civilised Victorian values. This is backed up by the fact that there is a “story” to the video, whereas most hard-core pornographic films do not apparently have storylines.

Another indicator of the more relaxed moral standards Wells’ imagines for the year 2100 comes later in the same chapter when Howard, a man who has been assigned to liase with Graham by the council and ease him into living in the modern world, comes to visit Graham and finds him bored. He suggests a form of entertainment which to Victorian readers would have seemed even more scandalous than pornography;

“‘Our social ideas,’ he said, ‘have a certain increased liberality, perhaps, in comparison with your times. If a man wishes to relieve such tedium as this- by feminine society, for instance. We think it no scandal. We have cleared our minds of formulae. There is in our city a class, a necessary class, no longer despised- discreet-’”

Such ideas as these would have been totally unacceptable in the time in which Wells’ was writing, and it is quite a brave step for him to go to such lengths of description. While prostitution has not actually been legalised yet, our moral standards are significantly different, more relaxed than those of the Victorians, and it shows how good Wells must have been at looking at the social trends of his time and predicting where these would lead to.

Later in the book, when Graham is at last out and about, we get to see more of the world around. One of the first developments in the world that Wells’ predicts is the way in which people travel. He predicts great roads, known as “Eahadmite roads” after the substance out of which they are constructed (which we are told superseded rubber as the material of choice for roads!). These roadways are described thus:

“rushing along as fast as a nineteenth century express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse overlapping slats with little interspaces that permitted it to follow the curvatures of the street. Upon it were seats, and here and there little kiosks.”

It is in the description of means of transport, however, that When the Sleeper Wakes comes to one of its’ weaker points. A great deal of the book is based around the subject of manned flight, something about which Graham takes great delight in learning, and which forms a major part of the climax of the book. It is a pity, therefore, that the ideas Wells’ has about the future of flight are so wildly inaccurate that from a 2000 perspective they are close to comical.

There are two main forms of aerial transport described in the book, aeroplanes and aeropiles. While he gets the name of the former right, he is pretty inaccurate when he comes to describing it. The following are the descriptions of the aeroplane and the aeropile, both given in chapter 16.

“On the one hand was the great engine-driven aeroplane, a double row of horizontal floats with a big aerial screw behind… The aeroplanes flew safely only in a calm or moderate wind, and sudden storms, occurrences that were now accurately predictable, rendered them for all practical purposes useless. They were built of enormous size- the usual stretch of wing being six hundred feet or more, and the length of the fabric a thousand feet.”

“The little aeroplies (as for no particular reason they were distinctively called) were of an altogether different type. Several of these were going to and fro in the air. They were designed to carry only one or two persons... Their sails, which were brilliantly coloured, consisted of only two pairs of lateral air floats in the same plane, and of a screw behind.”

Of course, here we are now in 2000, just over one hundred years before the book is set, and already such planes as these have been superseded, and aircraft never really developed in the manner described anyway. It would be harsh, however, to judge Wells by the standards of our times, as in 1898 descriptions as flying vehicles such as these probably seemed quite impressive. There is no way that Wells could have predicted such developments as the jet engine, although it is somewhat ironic that he did live to see his predictions entirely surpassed (he died in 1946). Wells looked around at the way manned flight was developing, and tailored his descriptions thus. He even has Graham claim that “even during his previous life, two lines of investigation had pointed clearly to two distinct types of contrivance as possible, and both of these had been realised.” So Wells was simply extending research that already existed in the last years of the nineteenth century. He did, however, revise the passages on flying to bring them closer to the reality of the time in his 1910 revision of the book, The Sleeper Awakes.

When Graham goes up in an aircraft for the first time, we get to see more of the world outside of London, where the vast majority of the book is set. Earlier on in the book, we learn that “nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only... some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single cultivation and preserved the name of a town- as Bournemouth, Wareham or Swanage.”

When Graham goes flying, he passes over the countryside of the twenty-second century, he sees what is left of the little country communities and farms that had been such a part of life in the nineteenth century. .”..the vast treeless expanse of country from which all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins.” We also see how farming has changed into a vast industry, being told of “the vegetable fields of the Thames valley- innumerable minute oblongs of ruddy brown, intersected by shining threads, the sewage ditches.” This is a pretty accurate description of current commercial farming, although of course I will never know whether or not it will still be accurate in the book’s 2100 timezone.

Another subject which When the Sleeper Wakes tackles, with mixed success it has to be said, is multiculturalism. On the plus side, Wells seems to be predicting that we will become a society made of many differing ethnic groups, rather than simply Caucasian, something which must in 1898 have seemed unlikely, and is another example of Wells being able to see further ahead than others. For instance, when Graham wants to go out and about and investigate the London of 2100, he is given a guide, Asano, “whose face proclaimed him Japanese, albeit he spoke English like an Englishman.” When Graham first meets Asano, he rather tactlessly asks “what about the yellow peril?” Asano replied that “they found that we were white men after all,” a clear shout for racial equality if ever there was one.

For some inexplicable reason, Wells does not extend this prediction of racial tolerance and equality to those of African origin. Wells’ prejudice against black people is fairly well documented, and sadly it comes to the fore in When the Sleeper Wakes. There is repeated mention of a group of barbaric law enforcers known as “the Black Police,” regiments made up entirely of Africans who are referred to on occasion as “damned n1ggers,” and when being spoken of in a news report it is casually mentioned that “once or twice they got out of hand, and tortured and mutilated wounded and captured insurgents,” almost as if such things are only to be expected of Africans. One could argue that Wells was merely reflecting the attitudes of his times, but in a book where he predicts so much that has come to pass, it is sad to see that he could not have revised his opinions on race.

The final areas where When the Sleeper Wakes makes accurate prophecies are in the media and the commercialism of a modern world. When Graham is out and about on the streets of London, he comes across many news-vending machines known as “babble machines,” which speak and show the day’s news to the public. “In all the more comfortable apartments of the city,” we learn, “were fixed Babble Machines that would speak directly if a lever was pulled. The tenant of the apartment could connect this with the cables of any of the great News Syndicates that he preferred.” Another accurate prediction with striking similarities to cable television.

Commercialism is, as mentioned above, the final great idea that Wells mentions in When the Sleeper Wakes, although sadly he does not make as much of it as he could and perhaps should have. In chapter 14, when Graham is taken up into one of the great wind-vanes so that he can look out at London and the surrounding area, one of the things to strike his attention is “the great fleets of advertisement balloons and kites that receded in irregular vistas northward and southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys.”

Later, when he and Asano are out on the streets, Graham decides to visit a nursery where the young babies are kept, and sees the automatic nursing machines, which were; “a vista of mechanical figures, with arms, shoulders and breasts of astonishingly realistic modelling. Articulation, and texture, but mere brass tripods below, and having in the place of features a flat disc bearing advertisements likely to be of interest to mothers.” Such cynical placing of adverts in prominent places to attract the sort of customers a company wanted was an invention barely starting in Wells’ day, but in 2000 it is the norm, and with increased commercialism there will probably be adverts literally everywhere by the year 2100.

So, for all of the nice touches and flashes of inspiration, what does When the Sleeper Wakes actually tell us about the future? Well, unlike many such works, and in particular contrast to Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not overly pessimistic. Graham’s story does not end happily, but with his death there is the promise of a new happy legacy being restored to the world of the future.

As a prediction of things to come, it has perhaps lost much of its impact in the last one hundred years. In 1898, the descriptions of flying, the commercialism, the differing moral standards, all of these things must have seemed far more amazing than they do now. The book’s major failing for a 2000 audience is that virtually all of the predictions and technological advancements have already been surpassed, and this loses much of the impact it must have held for Victorian readers. Perhaps this is why the book is less remembered than many of Wells’ other works; it has simply not stood the test of time as well as The War of the Worlds or The Invisible Man.

In short then, When the Sleeper Wakes tells a good and indeed involving story of one man’s experiences when thrust into an alien future world, and on the level of plain storytelling can still be well appreciated even today. But as a work of speculative fiction, a tantalising glimpse of the world that might be, it no longer carries any significant weight.