The Sleeper Awakes (When the Sleeper Wakes) is an 1899 dystopian science fiction novel by English writer H. G. Wells, about a man who sleeps for 203 years, waking up in a completely transformed late 21st to early 22nd century London in which he has become the richest man in the world.

The main character awakes to see his dreams realised, and the future revealed to him in all its horrors and malformities.

[1] When the Sleeper Wakes was originally published as a serial in The Graphic (London)[3] and Harper's Weekly (New York),[4] with illustrations by Henri Lanos.

[3][4] When the book was about to be reprinted again, Wells used this opportunity "to make a number of excisions and alterations", and changed its title to The Sleeper Awakes.

As he explains in the preface of the 1910 edition, he was overworked and wrote under considerable pressure when he authored the original version simultaneously with another novel called Love and Mr. Lewisham, in addition to his journalistic obligations.

Before going on a "badly needed holiday" to Italy, he felt he had to complete one of the two novels, and so rushed the ending on When the Sleeper Wakes just to finish it, hoping to return to it when he came back to England and before it went into print.

But when he got home he fell seriously ill, and after forcing himself to complete Love and Mr. Lewisham, he never got the chance to do any rewriting of When the Sleeper Wakes before it was published.

Instead he played the role of the "editorial elder brother" and cut some passages that felt redundant, improved certain "clumsy phrases and repetitions", straightened out some ambivalences at the end, and removed all signs of any love interest between characters.

Over the years, the trustees, the "White Council", have used his wealth to establish a vast political and economic world order.

He meets an old man who tells him the story of the Sleeper – the White Council invested his wealth to buy the industries and political entities of half the world, establishing a plutocracy and sweeping away parliament and the monarchy.

Themes include socialism; the betrayal of revolution; and how an elite can manipulate a population both by oppression and impoverishment on the one hand, and by the use of technology and provision of pleasure on the other.

In this respect, the book has elements explored later both in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

[citation needed] The book itself sometimes references prior utopian novels of the time, including Looking Backward, News from Nowhere, and Crystal Age, although the latter two are not mentioned in the revised edition.

[9] Pulp writer Harry Stephen Keeler took the idea further in a 1914 story called "John Jones' Dollar", in which a solar system's economy is built around a single silver dollar left to accumulate until the year 2921 to the "astounding" sum of $6.3 trillion, financing an interplanetary socialist paradise.

[citation needed] Terry Nation drew inspiration from The Sleeper Awakes for the British dystopian science fiction television series, Blake's 7.

The main character Philip J. Fry, who was cryogenically frozen and revived in the 31st Century, discovers that his bank account has continued to accrue interest over the course of a thousand years.