| Notes |
Warning: spoilers ahead (although you won't really miss anything by not reading this book)
It's basically about a guy named Graham who falls into a coma and wakes up 200 years later. His meager assets have grown, thanks to compound interest and shrewd investment by a board of trustees, to encompass most of the world's property. Graham, the eponymous "Sleeper", finds out that he is basically the king of the world. Unfortunately, this is only a figurehead position, and the Council (the board of trustees) and an aristocratic union boss battle to control Graham and his vast wealth (ending over 150 years of peace, by the way). In the meantime, Graham becomes fascinated with all the new-fangled technology and social mores that make up the world of the future. In the end, he realizes that the proletariat is the only population worth fighting for and helps them overthrow the evil money-grubbing power-hungry bad guys. And dies in a kamikaze plane crash after releasing ownership of all his possessions to the people of world. There. Now you don't need to read the book.
The reason I just spoiled the book for you is that it was unexpectedly awful. I was enjoying H.G. Wells' quaint Victorian vision of the future, fascinated by his ideas of rapid transit via zip-lines and moving sidewalks, flying stages for whirlygigs made of fabric, and the personal movie projector, until his not-so-quaint Victorian racism began to shine through.
By the end of the book, I could no longer cheer for the protagonist — or any other character for that matter. If anything, I felt sympathy for the "villains" of the book: African mercenaries conscripted to keep the peace in the tumult of cities in the throes of proletarian revolt. Wells described these soldiers as if they were robots, lesser humans deserving of scorn whose souls were forfeit and whose violent deaths (at the hands of the Graham, no less) were celebrated by the poor, white working class. Graham even makes a speech at some point about the equality of all men and women — apparently he forgot that people of color are humans too. Ugh.
Wells was a radical thinker and an amazing storyteller with some quite progressive ideas, but I just couldn't stomach his white supremacist leanings. If you must read this book, read it for his fascinating predictions of what happens when:
- everyone stops reading and watches the "Babble Machine" instead
- a board of trustees controls the assets of an immortal entity (the corporation)
- agriculture is automated and the city makes the countryside obsolete
- instantaneous worldwide communication is possible
- intercontinental air travel is commonplace
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