ARCHIVE 002 · READER’S GUIDE
WHAT CAME
BEFORE
The story so far, for readers meeting Wells’s Sleeper for the first time.
This is an original guide to the source novel. It is not a chapter by H. G. Wells.
In H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes, Graham falls into a trance in nineteenth-century England and wakes 203 years later. While he slept, the estate held for him grew into an ownership claim over much of the world. A council of trustees governed through that claim. Graham wakes to a London of Moving Ways, vast flying stages and machinery that runs whether or not its owners can be seen.
Ostrog leads a revolt against the Council and puts Graham before the people as their Master. The Council falls. Then Graham sees how little has passed to those who fought: Ostrog still holds the instruments of command. When he brings aircraft toward London to break the resistance, Graham broadcasts an appeal and flies out to meet them.
Wells revised the novel after its 1899 publication and called the new version The Sleeper Awakes. It ends with Graham falling from his aircraft while the struggle continues below. In the preface to that revision, Wells says Graham dies and leaves the contest between Ostrog and the people undecided.
After the Sleeper begins at the Council House when news of the fall reaches Eliza Marr’s archive. Documents still carry Graham’s name. The city still needs water, transport and food. Eliza and the people around her must decide what the evidence permits them to say and what the city cannot wait for them to settle.
Source and edition basis: H. G. Wells, The Sleeper Awakes (revised edition), Project Gutenberg eBook #12163; sleeperarchive.com/source/.