Maps and Lives: H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes

This article considers H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910), a revision of When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), as a heuristic work in which the author places in counterpoint different ways of representing future societies. The different epistemologies involved—the perspective of the voyeur-god and the “pedestrian”—are derived from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). The author argues that Wells’s suggestion in the preface of the 1924 Atlantic Edition—that readers consult the first iteration of his proposed World State in Anticipations (1901)—is a strident, if misguided, attempt to clarify his fin-de-siécle political commitments, to eliminate the ambiguities of The Sleeper Awakes. In conclusion, the author proposes that we can understand the contrast between the two works as representing a more general tension in Wells’s utopianism.