purpose beyond that of interesting or exciting the reader with such
imaginations as the Martians, whose only use was to threaten humanity
with extinction. Mr Wells' own sight of our blindness, our complacent
acceptance of the sphere as an oblate or prolate spheroid, might be,
he hoped, another of the marvels which we should come to accept
through the medium of romance. So he began tentatively at first to
introduce a vivid criticism of the futility of present-day society
into his fantasies, and the first and the least of these books was
that published in 1899 as _When the Sleeper Wakes_, a title afterwards
changed to _The Sleeper Awakes_.

In the two opening chapters we find the same delightfully realistic
treatment of the unprecedented slowly mingling with the commonplace.
The first appearance of Graham the Sleeper, tormented then by the
spectres and doubts that accompany insomnia, is made so credible that
we accept his symptoms without the least demur; his condition is
merely unusual enough to excite a trembling interest. Even the
passing of his early years of trance does not arouse scepticism. But
then we fall with one terrific plunge into the world of A.D. 2100,
and, like Graham, we cannot realise it. Moreover this changed,
developed world has a slightly mechanical air. The immense enclosed
London, imagined by Mr Wells, is no Utopia, yet, like the dream of
earlier prophets, it is too logical to entice us into any
hallucination; and we come, fatally, to a criticism of the syllogism.

Mr Wells himself has confessed, in a new Preface, that this is "one of
the most ambitious and least satisfactory" of his books; and explains
that it was written against time, when he was on the verge of a
serious illness. It is superfluous, therefore, to criticise it in
detail, but one or two points in relation to the sociological idea