"The Sleeper Awakes" belongs to the genre of dystopian science fiction, the preferred working ground for Wells. A futuristic Rip-van-Winkle who has been sleeping for more than two hundred years, awakes one day to find himself the richest man alive. All his dreams and prayers have been answered. But his new life is not that peaceful and fortunate. Wells’ dystopian vision openly criticizes the march of progress, human greed, and urbanization. The future London in Graham’s post-sleeping world is not a paradise, but living hell. "The Sleeper Awakes" is a novel that readers might easily relate to Orwell’s "1984" or Fritz Lang’s cinematic masterpiece "Metropolis".

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was an English writer, remembered mostly for his science fiction works. Often described as a futurist, H. G. Wells’s influence cannot be neglected for his works foresaw many technological innovations such as space travel, the atomic bomb, and the Internet. Four times Nobel Prize in Literature nominee, Wells explored a wide array of themes in his works, occupying one of the central seats in the canon of British literature. Some of his best works include the time-travel novel "The Time Machine", the sci-fi adventure novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau", the mankind-versus-aliens novel "The War of the Worlds" and more than seventy short stories.