SLEEPER AWAKES

   As the 19th century progressed and the planet became more and more thoroughly explored, authors of UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS began to abandon present-day LOST WORLDS and ISLANDS as venues for their ideal societies, and instead to locate their speculations in the future, perhaps hundreds of years hence. Almost always these speculations were framed by prologues (and sometimes epilogues) set at the time the novel was written; thisframe served to introduce the protagonist who was to travel into the future and act the role of inquisitive visitor to the new world. The route he (the protagonist was almost always male) generally took seems in retrospect an odd one. Though TIME MACHINES were available to fiction writers before the end of the century, they were rarely used, either by utopian/dystopian speculators or by tellers of tales. Even H.G. WELLS, who conceived perhaps the first imaginatively plausible device in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), did not re-use the idea, even though the notion of aninstantaneous trip through time served one essential function for the writer who wished to illuminate the world to come: it brought the then and the now into abrupt and glaring contrast. When Wells came to write his first dystopia, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt The Sleeper Awakes 1910), he fell back on the convention of the protagonist who falls asleepin the present day and wakes again in the future. Not for the first time in his career, he did not invent but gave definitive form to (and named, in the vt) a significant sf theme or motif.The sleeper-awakes device shares with TIME TRAVEL, however, the capacity to transit centuries in the turning of a page, so that the essential function of contrast between the then and the now can be retained in exemplary focus. The two most famous late-19th-century utopias in the English language, Edward BELLAMY's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and William MORRIS's News from Nowhere(1890 US), took advantage of the device to sharpen contrasts throughout. Many less famous titles, like Ismar THIUSEN's The Diothas (1883), also utilized it. In his Science Fiction: The Early Years (1991), E.F. BLEILER lists about 40 further novels and stories published before 1930 - by no means all of them utopias or dystopias - which feature an awakened sleeper. Few have retained much popularity, although Alvarado M. FULLER's A.D. 2000 (1890), W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal Age (1887; rev 1906), HoraceW.C. NEWTE's The Master Beast (1907; vt The Red Fury 1919) and Edward SHANKS's The People of the Ruins (1920) remain of some interest.It is hard to escape the sense that the sleeper-awakes structure betrayed, even before the beginning of the 20th century, an undue fastidiousness of imagination, and that some straightforward magic (like a time machine) might always have been a more elegant option; even more attractive to the imagination, of course, would have been a story which did not need a time-frame or anchor to make its point about the worlds to come, or to thrill its readers with the new. One of the centrally important accomplishments of GENRE SF has been the abandonment of the anchor of the present day, for most genre sf is set unabashedly in the future, and needs no present-day protagonist to reassure its readers of the imaginative reality of the new worlds. A non-genre writer like J. Leslie MITCHELL might still hint at something along the lines of the device when he sent the eponymous heroine of Gay Hunter (1934) 20,000 years hence, but few sleepers-awake stories appeared in genre sf until the development of the notion of the GENERATION STARSHIP, in the bowels of which might repose thousands of humans in SUSPENDED ANIMATION; and, anyway, here the sleepers tend not to be the protagonists of the tale - it is their shepherds, in the here and now of the narrative, who generally fill that role. Only occasionally - as in Orson Scott CARD's Hot Sleep (fixup 1979) - will a sleeper awake from generation-starship solitude as protagonist in a changed world. Other genre-sf examples of the device either - like Mack REYNOLDS's Looking Backward, from the Year 2000 (1973) - are introduced asa homage, or - as in T.J. BASS's remarkable Half Past Human (fixup 1971) - are integrated into genre pyrotechnics that far transcend the original simplicity of the notion. But these are eccentric examples. When, after 1926, the future became domesticated as a venue for the imagination, thesleeper-awakes tale faded away.There are also many tales in both 19th-century sf and genre sf which feature a figure from the past whoawakens into the present. Indeed, this is a far older theme, growing perhaps from legends like that of Sleeping Beauty and famously given new life by Washington Irving (1783-1859) in "Rip Van Winkle" (in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent [in parts 1819-20]), whose lazy protagonistfalls asleep in the Catskills for 20 years. Modern tales of this sort rarely focus on the awakened sleeper, but on the impact that an intruder from beyond, whose responses to us may well be inappropriate or alien, might have upon our own world.

   JC