"The Sleeper Awakes" belongs to the genre of dystopian science fiction, the preferred working ground for Wells. A futuristic Rip-van-Winkle who has been sleeping for more than two hundred years, awakes one day to find himself the richest man alive. All his dreams and prayers have been answered. But his new life is not that peaceful and fortunate. Wells' dystopian vision openly criticizes the march of progress, human greed, and urbanization. The future London in Graham's post-sleeping world is not a paradise, but living hell. "The Sleeper Awakes" is a novel that readers might easily relate to Orwell's "1984" or Fritz Lang's cinematic masterpiece "Metropolis".
