The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of "When the Sleeper Wakes" - H.G. Wells The Sleeper Awakes (1910) is a dystopian science fiction novel by H. G. Wells about a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed London, where, because of compound interest on his bank accounts, 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. The novel is a rewritten version of When the Sleeper Wakes a story by Wells that was serialised between 1898 and 1899. The novel was originally published, as When the Sleeper Wakes, in The Graphic from 1898 to 1903 and illustrated by H. Lanos. Dissatisfied with its original form, Wells, who was an outspoken socialist and author of prophetic writings, rewrote it in 1910. "Like most of my earlier work", he wrote in the 1910 edition's preface, "it was written under considerable pressure; there are marks of haste not only in the writing of the latter part, but in the very construction of the story". The short story "A Story of the Days To Come" (1897) is a forerunner of the novel, being a tale set within the same future society.