When the Sleeper Awakes

When the Sleeper Awakes is a science fiction novel by the English writer H. G. Wells, published in 1899. Its subject is the twenty-first century, into which its narrator wakes after two centuries of sleep.

The sleeper is a man of the 1890s who cannot sleep, falls into a trance and does not wake for over two hundred years. In the meantime his small fortune has been invested and reinvested until he is the wealthiest person alive and the legal owner of the world's machinery, which is administered in his name by men who have never met him. He comes out of the trance to find a hierarchy in which the great mass of people are poor and more than a third are held as slaves, and he is horrified by what has been done on his behalf.

The future England of the novel is administered rather than governed: the same institutions that collect the sleeper's money run the lives of the people below him, and the crowds cling to a dream of the man who will one day wake and put things right. The book is one of Wells's early scientific romances, and it stands with his other visions of a managed future.