When the Sleeper Awakes

Imagine falling asleep for 200 years and waking up super rich in a crazy future city! A guy named Graham sleeps a long time and becomes the boss because his money grew huge. But bad guys are ruling everyone with flying machines and giant screens. He teams up with a brave lady to fight back and make things fair for poor workers trapped underground. It's like a wild adventure in a flying London full of surprises!

In H.G. Wells' 'When the Sleeper Wakes' (1899, revised 1910), protagonist George Gresham, a reclusive Victorian everyman, falls into a trance-like sleep in 1897 and awakens over two centuries later in a transformed London of the year 2100. Amassed a colossal fortune through compound interest, he emerges as the world's richest man, unwittingly idolized as 'the Sleeper' by the oppressed laboring classes while exploited by the ruling oligarchy led by the cunning Ostrog. Thrust into a stratospheric metropolis of towering Babble Towers, vast moving ways, and omnipresent advertising, Graham grapples with disorientation amid revolutionary fervor, allying with the beautiful Helen Wotton to challenge the regime's authoritarian control over society. As Graham assumes leadership of the burgeoning uprising, the narrative escalates into a techno-political thriller, pitting personal agency against systemic tyranny. Wells masterfully extrapolates early 20th-century trends into a dystopian vision of aerial battleships, labor exploitation via underground factories, and mass surveillance through colossal screens. Ultimately, the Sleeper's awakening catalyzes a precarious bid for egalitarian reform, underscoring the fragility of power structures and the double-edged sword of technological progress in reshaping human destiny.