So, in 1910, for a new edition of his works, Wells rewrote the book and published it with a new title, The Sleeper Awakes. Later, Wells became dissatisfied with the way he’d been forced to write When The Sleeper Wakes at top speed – he had been under pressure to complete another novel and to write a number of journalistic articles at the same time, and he was also ill during the writing of the second half. Invariably, the civilisation of the future is shown to have either solved or exacerbated whatever the author sees as the great social issues of his own day, so that the genre offers an author free rein to make prophecies and predictions, as well as working in as much social and political satire on their own times, as he or she wants. (If you think about it, falling asleep and waking in the far future is a variation on the theme of time travel – only with no coming back!)
It’s Wells’s version of the familiar trope of a man who falls asleep for an unnaturally long period of time and wakes up in a future where everything has changed, where a new civilisation is in place.
Wells was still in his early phase of creating genre-defining science fantasy stories when he wrote When The Sleeper Wakes, which was serialised in the Graphic magazine from January to May 1899.
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