2016 read #14: The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells.

The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells
190 pages
Published 1910
Read from February 2 to February 24
Rating: ★ out of 5

CN: racism, sexual violence.

The works of Verne, Wells, Doyle, and other early writers of "scientific romances" are tainted with the racism of their times. In my limited experience, most of this racism has taken the form of the "Sambo" caricature, whether it be Zambo in The Lost World or Neb in The Mysterious Island -- a dehumanizing and degrading archetype, to be sure, but (in the context of contemporary popular thought) more or less a positive role, occasionally even heroic in small ways. With all my experience reading dead white dudes, however, I was not expecting the horrible racism and ugliness of the second half of The Sleeper Awakes.

The first half of the novel has occasional nasty gleams of this racial stereotyping, but I initially abandoned the read a couple weeks ago because, well, I had the flu and couldn't concentrate on jack, but also because the book was boring. Old-timey futurism is interesting in theory, but Wells' (occasional) gift for weaving interesting story through the worldbuilding fails him here. The Sleeper awakes after a trance of two centuries to find a world in some ways not far removed from our own reality. The despotic revolutionary Ostrog exults in the ascendancy of the "real aristocracy" of wealth, a two-level society of debauched and dissipated oligarchs crushing a vast, uneducated laboring class under their heel. The interests of "mercantile piety" compete for worshipers and tithe money with slogans the modern advertising industry (not to mention modern megachurches) would recognize. Automated news outlets incessantly hoot and gibber for the attention of the lowest common denominator in order to disseminate oligarchic propaganda. This would all be fascinating sociological speculation, remarkable for its prescience, if the plot had any momentum -- or, indeed, if the first two-thirds of the book involved anything more than the Sleeper observing how society has changed, first from afar on platforms and catwalks, later in disguise on the lower walkways and subterranean factories. And when Wells finally remembers to slip a plot in -- well, without exaggeration, I can say it might be the most racist shit I have ever read in a published novel. Wells' prophetic vision gets lost in an appalling glimpse of 1910.

Ostrog, to consolidate his power and forestall popular unrest in support of the Sleeper, summons a black police force from South Africa -- which immediately rouses the London populace into panic and open revolt, and shocks the Sleeper out of his inertia into his own personal rebellion. The black police, you see, look forward to "lordly times among the poor white trash": raping, terrorizing, committing bestial atrocities too horrible to print. Because they're black, and that's how Wells imagines their innate natures. "White men must be mastered by white men," the Sleeper implores Ostrog in one last appeal -- and then the climactic air battle revolves around the Sleeper delaying the African air fleet's approach to London so that the white underclass can mobilize a defense.

This is some evil shit here. We're talking The Birth of a Nation nastiness. This goes beyond the smug presumption of racial superiority in Verne and Doyle (at least in what I've read of their work). This sours me on Wells, even if, to be sadly realistic, he probably wasn't out of line with much popular white sentiment at the time.