the sleeper awakes, by H. G. Wells

WARNING: SPOLIERS AHEAD

As always with older Sci-Fi, its quite fun to see how different the world looks now than people imagined it say a hundred years ago. Some things Wells writes about seem obviously wrong in retrospective but then again, how could he have known. And yet at times i felt like he was disregarding basic aspects of the way humans live and act. Aside from obvious racism he describes how humans have completely “forgotten” about physical books, a technology which has been made obsolete with the growing share of computers in peoples homes almost 50 years ago, replaced by a sort of tv. The implication here seems to be that new technology completely replaces old kinds of entertainment but humans seem to like traditional media too much to actually let it go completely. On the other hand, he, as the only footnote of the entire book told me, managed to predict airplane combat almost 20 years before that actually happened and some of his other ideas like moving streets or “babble machines”, the tvs, are fun as well. Talking story, the MC, Graham, falls asleep and somehow wakes up around 200 years later, as the owner of the world because his wealth got invested under the supervision of a council which became a defacto government during his sleep. The likelyhood of this seems rather small, but its important for the not very interesting story, the only part that really got me thinking was the revolution under “the boss” which really just used the people to replace one oppressive government with another one. Graham tries to finaly realize the “socialist dreams of his time” and dies, which marks the end of the book. Its a rare way to end books, but you can tell why as its in no way a satisfactory ending to the book. Wells has finished with his arguments about socialism though and because of that has no interest about finishing the story. Its interesting through the lens of someone living at the time it was published, and its certainly relevant has he inspired a lot of other books, notably 1984 by George Orwell, but on its own its really not that interesting.