The Sleeper Awakes.

Imagine closing your eyes on a familiar evening and opening them on a city of aerial roads, wind-vanes and vast glass halls, only to learn that you own it all. H.G. Wells built The Sleeper Awakes around exactly that vertigo, and the result is one of his most restless and troubling speculations about power.

What it's about

Graham, an insomniac Victorian, falls into a cataleptic sleep and does not wake for more than two hundred years. During his long trance his modest investments have swollen, through the machinery of compound interest and a governing council acting in his name, into control of the entire planet. When he finally rouses, he finds himself a living legend, a figurehead over a stratified, mechanised society, and the unwitting flashpoint for the discontent of the masses who labour beneath it.

Themes

Wells is fascinated by capital that grows while its owner does nothing, by the widening gulf between rulers and ruled, and by the way a name can become a banner in a struggle its bearer barely understands. Technology dazzles here, but it also confines; the novel keeps asking who really holds authority when systems outlive the people who set them running.

Why it still matters

The book's anxieties about concentrated wealth, media spectacle and populations managed from above feel startlingly current. Wells wrote it at the turn of the twentieth century, yet its picture of a world engineered for the few reads as a direct ancestor of later dystopian fiction, and a reminder of how early those warnings were sounded.

Who it's for

Readers who love the ambition of early science fiction, anyone drawn to the roots of the dystopian tradition, and those who enjoy Wells at his most politically charged will find plenty here to argue with and admire.