The Sleeper Awakes

by H. G. Wells

Category: Fiction

Status: Available

Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg

About This Book

"The Sleeper Awakes" by H. G. Wells is a dystopian science fiction novel published in 1899 and revised in 1910. A man falls into a coma in 1897 London and awakens 203 years later to discover he has become the world's wealthiest person. His fortune has been used to create a vast plutocratic order controlling half the world. Caught between rival factions and revolutionary forces, he must navigate a nightmarish future society where workers live in misery and his own role as figurehead threatens humanity's freedom. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

📢Advertisement

Preview

THE SLEEPER AWAKES

A Revised Edition of "When the Sleeper Wakes"

H.G. WELLS

1899

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

When the Sleeper Wakes, whose title I have now altered to _The Sleeper Awakes_, was first published as a book in 1899 after a serial appearance in the Graphic and one or two American and colonial periodicals. It is one of the most ambitious and least satisfactory of my books, and I have taken the opportunity afforded by this reprinting to make a number of excisions and alterations. Like most of my earlier work, it was written under considerable pressure; there are marks of haste not only in the writing of the latter part, but in the very construction of the story. Except for certain streaks of a slovenliness which seems to be

... (scroll to read more)

About This Edition

This edition of The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells is catalogued on Libreya under Fiction and runs approximately 75,696 words — about 378 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.

On Libreya, the text has been carefully formatted for comfortable reading on any screen — with consistent chapter navigation, adjustable font sizes, and four reading themes: light, sepia, dark, and night mode. Your reading position is saved automatically when you sign in, so you can pick up exactly where you left off across any device. The original text has not been altered in any way; what you read here is the same work as it appeared in its original published form.

About Classic Fiction

Classic fiction represents the highest achievements of literary imagination. The novels in this genre have shaped how generations of readers understand human nature, society, and the fundamental questions of existence. Reading 19th and early 20th-century novels offers far more than historical interest: these stories explore love, ambition, morality, and identity with an insight that remains startlingly relevant today. Authors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Hardy, and Dickens wrote for readers much like us — people trying to make sense of a complicated world — and their observations on class, relationships, power, and conscience carry across centuries with barely diminished force. Classic fiction is also where the novel as an art form reached some of its greatest heights: innovative narrative structures, deeply realized characters, and prose styles that reward slow, attentive reading. These are not museum pieces. They are living works that continue to be discussed, adapted, and argued over because they capture something essential and enduring about human experience.