The Sleeper Awakes

This is the annotated edition including the rare biographical essay by Edwin E. Slosson called "H. G. Wells - A Major Prophet Of His Time". It is certainly an easy assumption to make that the readers of H. G. Wells' novel, "The Sleeper Awakes," will agree that it is, both in the story itself and in the illustrations, a truly wonderful production. Mr. Wells has devoted himself strictly to the weird and fantastic, and with great success in every case. This book is of the same character, but it is told so vividly, it is wrought out with such life-like detail, that the reader forgets that the book is only the product of a novelist's fancy, and lives for the time intent on the strange scenes and customs and peoples of London in 2100. "When the Sleeper Wakes" is a story of the future. Its plot is not remark able, but the realistic detail with which it is worked out is. Graham, the sleeper, goes into a trance at the end of the nineteenth century and sleeps for two hundred years. During all this time his small fortune continually increases, and when Graham awakes he finds that he has become the owner of more than half the world. His awakening is the signal for a general uprising in the sleeper's favor, led by one Ostrog. The sleeper escapes from the glass cage in which the councilors of the city have imprisoned him, joins Ostrog after an exciting chase over the great glass roof that covered the whole of London, and the councilors are defeated after a bloody battle along the moving ways. " The Sleeper Awakes" was at its time in all respects the most daring and successful novel of the future yet written, and for those who like this sort of fiction, it only remains to be said that here is a treat in store for them.