When the Sleeper Wakes

A man falls into a trance and wakes two centuries later to find that the wealth he unknowingly accumulated has made him the legal owner of half the world—and the sleeping figurehead of a vast, oppressive future society now rising in revolt. Wells imagines a towering twenty-first-century city of moving walkways and mass control, and a downtrodden populace that looks to the newly woken ‘Sleeper’ as its liberator. A dark, visionary dystopia that anticipated much of modern science fiction, it grapples with capitalism, revolution, and the machinery of power. Prophetic and unsettling, When the Sleeper Wakes is one of Wells’s most influential glimpses of a troubling future.