When the Sleeper Wakes (28 page)

He became aware of three others rushing towards him, aware of the urgent necessity of beating above them. Aëroplanes were all about him, circling wildly to avoid him, as it seemed. They drove past him, above, below, eastward and westward. Far away to the westward was the sound of a collision, and two falling flares. Far away to the southward a second squadron was coming. Steadily he beat upward. Presently all the aëroplanes were below him, but for a moment he doubted the height he had of them, and did not swoop again. And then he came down upon a second victim and all its load of soldiers saw him coming. The big machine heeled and swayed as the fear-maddened men scrambled to the stern for their weapons. A score of bullets sung through the air, and there flashed a star in the thick glass wind-screen that protected him. The aëroplane slowed and dropped to foil his stroke, and dropped too low. Just in time he saw the wind-wheels of Bromley hill rushing up towards him, and spun about and up as the aëroplane he had chased crashed among them. All its voices wove into a felt of yelling. The great fabric seemed to be standing on end for a second among the heeling and splintering vans, and then it flew to pieces. Huge splinters came flying through the air, its engines burst like shells. A hot rush of flame shot overhead into the darkling sky.

“Two!”
he cried, with a bomb from overhead bursting as it fell, and forthwith he was beating up again. A glorious exhilaration possessed him now, a giant activity. His troubles about humanity, about his inadequacy, were gone for ever. He was a man in battle rejoicing in his power. Aëroplanes seemed radiating from him in every direction, intent only upon avoiding him, the yelling of their packed passengers came in short gusts as they swept by. He chose his third quarry, struck hastily and did but turn it on edge. It escaped him, to smash against the tall cliff of London wall. Flying from that impact he skimmed the darkling ground so nearly he could see a frightened rabbit bolting up a slope. He jerked up steeply, and found himself driving over south London with the air about him vacant. To the right of him a wild riot of signal rockets from the Ostrogites banged tumultuously in the sky. To the south the wreckage of half a dozen air ships flamed, and east and west and north the air ships fled before him. They drove away to the east and north, and went about in the south, for they could not pause in the air. In their present confusion any attempt at evolution would have meant disastrous collisions. He could scarcely realize the thing he had done. In every quarter aëroplanes were receding. They were receding. They dwindled smaller and smaller. They were in flight!

He passed two hundred feet or so above the Roehampton stage. It was black with people and noisy with their frantic shouting. But why was the Wimbledon Park stage black and cheering, too? The smoke and flame of Streatham now hid the three further stages. He curved about and rose to see them and the northern quarters. First came the square masses of Shooter’s Hill into sight from behind the smoke, lit and orderly with the aëroplane that had landed and its disembarking negroes. Then came Blackheath, and then under the corner of the reek the Norwood stage. On Blackheath no aëroplane had landed but an aëropile lay upon the guides. Norwood was covered by a swarm of little figures running to and fro in a passionate confusion. Why? Abruptly he understood. The stubborn defence of the flying stages was over, the people were pouring into the underways of these last strongholds of Ostrog’s usurpation. And then, from far away on the northern border of the city, full of glorious import to him, came a sound, a signal, a note of triumph, the leaden thud of a gun. His lips fell apart, his face was disturbed with emotion.

He drew an immense breath. “They win,” he shouted to the empty air; “the people win!” The sound of a second gun came like an answer. And then he saw the aëropile on Blackheath was running down its guides to launch. It lifted clean and rose. It shot up into the air, driving straight southward and away from him.

In an instant it came to him what this meant. It must needs be Ostrog in flight. He shouted and dropped towards it. He had the momentum of his elevation and fell slanting down the air and very swiftly. It rose steeply at his approach. He allowed for its velocity and drove straight upon it.

It suddenly became a mere flat edge, and behold! he was past it, and driving headlong down with all the force of his futile blow.

He was furiously angry. He reeled the engine back along its shaft and went circling up. He saw Ostrog’s machine beating up a spiral before him. He rose straight towards it, won above it by virtue of the impetus of his swoop and by the advantage and weight of a man. He dropped headlong—dropped and missed again! As he rushed past he saw the face of Ostrog’s aëronaut confident and cool and in Ostrog’s attitude a wincing resolution. Ostrog was looking steadfastly away from him—to the south. He realized with a gleam of wrath how bungling his flight must be. Below he saw the Croyden hills. He jerked upward and once more he gained on his enemy.

He glanced over his shoulder and his attention was arrested by a strange thing. The eastward stage, the one on Shooter’s Hill, appeared to lift; a flash changing to a tall grey shape, a cowled figure of smoke and duct, jerked into the air. For a moment this cowled figure stood motionless, dropping huge masses of metal from its shoulders, and then it began to uncoil a dense head of smoke. The people had blown it up, aëroplane and all! As suddenly a second flash and grey shape sprang up from the Norwood stage. And even as he stared at this came a dead report, and the air wave of the first explosion struck him. He was flung up and sideways.

For a moment the aëropile fell nearly edgewise with her nose down, and seemed to hesitate whether to overset altogether. He stood on his wind-shield wrenching the wheel that swayed up over his head. And then the shock of the second explosion took his machine sideways.

He found himself clinging to one of the ribs of his machine, and the air was blowing past him and
upward.
He seemed to be hanging quite still in the air, with the wind blowing up past him. It occurred to him that he was falling. Then he was sure that he was falling. He could not look down.

He found himself recapitulating with incredible swiftness all that had happened since his awakening, the days of doubt, the days of Empire, and at last the tumultuous discovery of Ostrog’s calculated treachery. He was beaten but London was saved. London was saved!

The thought had a quality of utter unreality. Who was he? Why was he holding so tightly with his hands? Why could he not leave go? In such a fall as this countless dreams have ended. But in a moment he would wake. . . .

His thoughts ran swifter and swifter. He wondered if he should see Helen again. It seemed so unreasonable that he should not see her again. It
must
be a dream! Yet surely he would meet her. She at least was real. She was real. He would wake and meet her.

Although he could not look at it, he was suddenly aware that the earth was very near.

READING GROUP GUIDE

1. Some critics categorize Wells as a utopian whose works, while idealistic, are also pessimistic. Wells’s pessimism is quite evident, but what of his idealism? Can he in fact be classified as a utopian?

2. Carlo Pagetti, an Italian literary critic, argues that Wells did not create a new genre but rather slightly modified traditional literary devices such as the concept of a utopia, time travel, and alien visitors. Do you agree? If yes, how does
When the Sleeper Wakes
fit into traditional literature?

3. Some have criticized Wells for his overtly religious parodies in his novels such as
The Island of Dr. Moreau
and
The War in the Air
. Does
When the Sleeper Wakes
differ at all from these earlier novels? Obviously the new society Graham awakes to hails him as a messiah, but is he what modern readers would refer to as a Christlike figure?

4. In Wells’s previous novels his themes and outcomes are somewhat obvious—
The
Time Machine
was a play on the hierarchy of social class,
The Island of Dr. Moreau
was a comment on the possible pitfalls of bioengineering. Some believe the theme of this book deals with Victorians’ inheritance laws and the ills that Wells thought would come from such laws; others believe Wells was commenting on the division of capital and labor. Do you agree with either theory? If not, what do you think is the theme of this book?

5. In his book
H. G. Wells
J. D. Beresford talks of Wells’s turn from the “traditional” science fiction, such as Jules Verne wrote, to an overtly moralistic storytelling,
When the Sleeper Wakes
being the first in this experiment. Do you think Wells is overly moralistic? Do you believe none of Wells’s contemporaries had overhanging themes in their own works?

THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

Maya Angelou

Daniel J. Boorstin

A. S. Byatt

Caleb Carr

Christopher Cerf

Ron Chernow

Shelby Foote

Charles Frazier

Vartan Gregorian

Richard Howard

Charles Johnson

Jon Krakauer

Edmund Morris

Joyce Carol Oates

Elaine Pagels

John Richardson

Salman Rushdie

Oliver Sacks

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Carolyn See

William Styron

Gore Vidal

H. G. WELLS

Herbert George Wells—novelist, social critic, and visionary futurist who became one of the most prolific and widely read writers of his generation—was born in the London suburb of Bromley, Kent, on September 21, 1866. He came from a lower-middle-class background and grew up in circumstances of genteel poverty that would not have seemed out of place in a novel by Dickens. His father was at various times a gardener, professional cricket player, and shopkeeper; his mother was a house-keeper and former lady’s maid. The youngster, nicknamed Bertie, became an avid reader at the age of seven while lying bedridden with a broken leg.

Although he left school to become a draper’s apprentice at fourteen, Wells later won a scholarship to the Royal College of Science in South Kensington. There he studied zoology under T. H. Huxley, a noted disciple of Darwin who instilled in Wells a belief in social as well as biological evolution. Wells’s first prophetic work, “A Tale of the Twentieth Century,” was published in 1887 in the
Science Schools Journal.
Upon graduation from the University of London in 1890 he was a tutor until chronic ill-health made him decide to make a serious attempt at being a writer. He brought out A Text-Book of Biology (1893) and began contributing articles and fiction to magazines such as the
Pall Mall Gazette
. Impoverished and unhappily married, Wells eloped with Amy Catherine (“Jane”) Robbins, a former student of his, whom he later married and by whom he had two sons.

The serialization of
The
Time Machine
in 1895 made Wells famous overnight. A string of other scientific romances—including
The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896),
The Invisible Man
(1897),
The War
of the Worlds
(1898),
When the Sleeper Wakes
(1899), and
The First
Men in the Moon
(1901)—consolidated his reputation.

A socialist who believed in the perfectibility of mankind, Wells focused on utopian social and political themes in works of nonfiction beginning with
Anticipations
(1901),
The Discovery of
the Future
(1902),
Mankind in
the Making
(1903),
A Modern Utopia
(1905), and
The Future in America
(1906). Wells joined the Fabian Society in 1903 but left after fighting an unsuccessful war of wit and rhetoric over its policies with George Bernard Shaw.

Tired of being labeled “the English Jules Verne,” Wells wrote two popular comic novels featuring resilient Cockney heroes who triumph over adversity,
Kipps
(1905) and
The History of Mr.
Polly
(1910). The latter underscored one of his most basic themes: “If the world does not please you,
you can change it.
” A liaison with the young Fabian Amber Reeves inspired the novel
Ann Veronica
(1909) and produced a daughter, Anna Jane. Also published in 1909 was
Tono-Bungay,
a panoramic if scathing view of Edwardian England that many regard as his greatest novel.

Wells’s later fiction became increasingly autobiographical.
The New Machiavelli
(1911) and the best-selling
Mr. Bristling Sees
It Through
(1916) were the most notable. Others, such as
Marriage
(1912), prompted a young journalist named Rebecca West to dismiss him as the “old maid among novelists.” Yet the two conducted a ten-year love affair and had a son, Anthony West. Wells continued to produce compelling prognostications. Despite having dubbed World War I “the war that will end war,” he wrote
The World Set Free
(1914), a speculative history of the future that predicted the coming age of nuclear warfare.

In 1920
The Outline of History,
an encyclopedic work written to further the cause of world peace, brought Wells to the height of his fame. An international bestseller, the book included this memorable saying: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” The same year he traveled to Russia to meet Lenin and reported on the new Communist regime in
Russia in the Shadows
(1920).

In 1923 Wells ended his relationship with Rebecca West and later moved to the south of France with his new mistress, political exile Odette Keun. There he wrote
The World of William
Clissold
(1926), his most ambitious novel of the period. Upon returning to London in 1930 Wells brought out
The Science of Life
(1930) and
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of
Mankind
(1932), two companion volumes to
The Outline of History.

With the rise of fascism Wells became less optimistic about the future, and in
The Shape of Things to Come
(1933) he accurately predicted a second world war that would begin in 1939. However, he journeyed to the United States and Russia in 1934, attempting to promote global peace. Back in England he published his memoirs, the masterful two-volume
Experiment in Autobiography
(1934), and worked with Alexander Korda on a film version of
The Shape of Things to Come
. Though happily involved with Moura Budberg, the Russian spy who was his last companion, Wells remained fatalistic about mankind. The advent of World War II only heightened the author’s despondency as he lived to see many of his dire predictions come true. “Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me,” he bitterly observed. A final work,
Mind at the End of Its Tether
(1945), bleakly foretold the destruction of civilization.

H. G. Wells died suddenly and peacefully on August 13, 1946, just a few weeks before turning eighty, at his home in Hanover Terrace, London. Three days later his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the English Channel near the Isle of Wight. A third volume of autobiography,
H G. Wells in Love,
appeared posthumously in 1984.