[.ca] Penguin Classics Sleeper Awakes (ISBN 0141441062)

Not A Wells Classic, But A Good Book:
This isn't one of the most famous books in Well's canon, lacking the classic status awarded to books like War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man. The Sleeper Awakes is a good book, though not one on par with those works. It drags in some places, but is on the whole interesting for it's fairly unique (for the time; like many Wells novels, this has a central plotline that has been re-done by many a faceless SF author since.) Also, the vision of the future presented here is an interesting and slightly novel one, which Wells himself, in the introduction, admits to being one that will almost certainly never come to pass, which makes this book's warning not as clear as say, 1984's or Fahrenheit 451's, but is nevertheless notable. Thus, the novel is entertaining, and, in spots, fast-paced. Recommended for the Wells fan, newcomers to the father of science fiction should start elsewhere.

Good Edition for Students of Wells and SF History:
Science fiction fans simply looking for an entertaining story will want to skip this book. Its speculations, with a couple of exceptions, are dated -- Wells admitted such only ten years after it was written. The socialist values it expounds make one wonder whether Fabian Wells would have ever been satisfied with capitalism no matter what it did. The characters, again as Wells admitted, are Everyman and an implausible businessman villain. And yet Wells kept playing with this story over 21 years. It also was probably quite influential on a young Robert Heinlein, a Wells admirer. (It has moving roadways amongst other things.) The story? A man wakes up from a two hundred year coma to find out he's the richest man in the world. The capitalists who run this world hope he'll play along with them, continue to let them run the world using his money. But Sleeper Graham has other ideas and becomes a Socialist messiah to the oppressed. Students of science fiction's history will recognize a plot with a starting point similar to Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_ -- to which Wells gives a nod. They'll also be interested in the understandably wrong predictions about aerial warfare. Students of Wells will definately want to read this, one of his second-tier works. This book is a particularly good edition because it features a useful afterword noting the many changes Wells made in this story. It was first published as _When the Sleeper Wakes_, an 1899 magazine serial. It was changed for the book publication of the same year and further changed for the 1910 and 1921 editions.