PREFACE
This book, The Sleeper Awakes, was written in that remote and comparatively happy year, 1898. It is the first of a series of books which I have written at intervals since that time; The World Set Free is the latest; they are all "fantasias of possibility"; each one takes some great creative tendency, or group of tendencies, and develops its possible consequences in the future. The War in the Air did that for example with aviation, and is perhaps, as a forecast, the most successful of them all. The present volume takes up certain ideas already very much discussed in the concluding years of the last century, the idea of the growth of the towns and the depopulation of the country-side and the degradation of labour through the higher organisation of industrial production. "Suppose these forces to go on," that is the fundamental hypothesis of the story.
The "Sleeper" is of course the average man, who owns everything—did he but choose to take hold of his possessions—and who neglects everything. He wakes up to find himself the puppet of a conspiracy of highly intellectual men in a world which is a practical realisation of Mr. Belloc's nightmare of the Servile State. And the book resolves itself into as vigorous an imagination as the writer's quality permitted of this world of base servitude in hypertrophied cities.
Will such a world ever exist?
I will confess I doubt it. At the time when I wrote this story I had a considerable belief in its possibility, but later on, in Anticipations (1900), I made a very careful analysis of the causes of town aggregation and showed that a period of town dispersal was already beginning. And the thesis of a gradual systematic enslavement of
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