Excerpt from The Sleeper Awakes The Sleeper Awakes, was written in that remote and comparatively happy year, 1898. It is the first of a series of books which I have written at intervals since that time; The World Set Free is the latest; they are all "fantasias of possibility;" each one takes some great creative tendency, or group of tendencies, and develops its possible consequences in the future. The War in the Air did that for example with aviation, and is perhaps, as a forecast, the most successful of them all. The present volume takes up certain ideas already very much discussed in the concluding years of the last century, the idea of the growth of the towns and the depopulation of the country-side and the degradation of labour through the higher organisation of industrial production. "Suppose these forces to go on," that is the fundamental hypothesis of the story. The "Sleeper" is of course the average man, who owns everything did he but choose to take hold of his possessions and who neglects everything. He wakes up to find himself the puppet of a conspiracy of highly intellectual men hi a world which is a practical realisation of Mr. Belloc's nightmare of the Servile State. And the book resolves itself into as vigorous an imagination as the writers quality permitted of this world of base servitude in hypertrophied cities. Will such a world ever exist? I will confess I doubt it. At the time when I wrote this story I had a considerable belief in its possibility, but later on, in Anticipations(1900), I made a very careful analysis of the causes of town aggregation and showed that a period of town dispersal was already beginning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.