When the Sleeper Wakes Read Free

Brian Aldiss, among many others, have written works that are definitely science fiction, but don’t sort themselves neatly into the channels and grooves that mark American sci-fi.
    The revolutions in American science fiction have continued, though often what calls itself a revolution is merely a fad: Let’s all play with this style of writing or this version of the future, and sneer at those who don’t do it our way. The proof of this is simple: While nobody writes the pre-Campbellian, pre-Heinleinian kind of science fiction now (except for movies and comic books), all the different “revolutions” since then coexist quite easily, as readers skip from one to another. Readers can happily go from Heinlein to Le Guin to Niven to Ellison to Varley to Gibson to Willis to Robinson and find that they are still, basically, in the same literary neighborhood.
    While those who try to make the jump from Asimov back to a point only a few years earlier—E. E. “Doc” Smith, for instance— find that it is a vast gulf. Many readers of the still-modern Asimov find themselves reading Smith and saying, What
is
this?
    But nobody says that about H. G. Wells.
    Indeed, one might suggest that it took John W. Campbell’s revolution to bring the genre spawned in imitation of Wells up to the point where its writers were, in fact, writing the same kind of fiction as Wells. Had Campbell and Heinlein not transformed science fiction, it might have become a mere footnote in the history of the pulp magazines—after they were killed by the advent of television.
    And if the commercial genre of science fiction had faded away with the pulps, it is likely, I think (though impossible to say for sure), that Wells, too, might have faded into a footnote; or remained, at best, like Verne, prized for his particular stories, but not the founder of anything, and not terribly important in the history of literature.
    It’s rather like the old idea of the extended family—that you raise your children, and help them raise
their
children, so that when you’re old and too feeble to work, they’ll continue to take care of you.
    Wells’s work was so powerful in its blend of believability, satire, and vision, and came at such an apt time in history, that other writers sought to emulate him, and publishers to make money from selling the imitations.
    And those imitators—literary children, if you will—grew up, eventually, to be worthy successors, to the point that they are constantly finding new readers, not only for their own stories, but for the stories of their literary father, H. G. Wells.
    Today there are hundreds of different doors into science fiction. But at the beginning, there was only one door, and H. G. Wells was the one who turned the key, opened it, and stepped through, showing everyone else the way. In approaching
When the Sleeper Wakes,
modern readers will immediately notice some elements of strangeness in the way it’s written. Which is not at all surprising. Literature is written within the context of a literary community. Wells wrote using the literary tools available to a writer of his time, and the text of his story was designed with the expectations of his readers in mind.
    In Wells’s day, it was commonplace for the fiction writer to speak directly to the reader, as in this essay I can freely address you. Since then, however, the fashion has changed, and most books written in the past fifty years use what we call the “third person limited point of view,” in which the narrator shows the reader only what is seen, known, and felt by one character at a time.
    The result is that in contemporary fiction, we expect to know intimately only one character at a time, and experience each portion of the story as if we dwelt inside the viewpoint character’s mind. This encourages us to identify with that character— to draw the events of the story into our minds as if we had experienced them along with the viewpoint character.
    That intimacy was