Editor’s Note
“May you live in interesting times.”
—Chamberlain curse
We are currently living in interesting times; whether that is a blessing or a curse remains to be seen. Yet, we are not the first to have lived through complex and interesting times. We will not be the last.
H.G. Wells lived in interesting times—he witnessed both World Wars in his lifetime, the Spanish Influenza, the invention of the airplane, women’s suffrage, the atomic bomb, and so much more. His works are still widely read today and have influenced many modern authors. With current events bearing striking similarities to previous times in history where disillusionment and tensions have reached a boiling point, Wells’s writings are even more relevant. Many social influencers and literary circles are referencing George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. You might have recently heard quotes from Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World. But did you know that Wells inspired those authors with their dystopias and utopias? If so, you might presume that they were influenced by his most famous novels: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, or The Invisible Man . . . but you would be mistaken.
While those novels are famous for a reason, H.G. Wells plumbed the depths of society and human nature in many of his other works; The Sleeper Awakes and Men Like Gods are not commonplace titles or required reading for many educational programs, but they are shockingly applicable to our present times. I chose to marry these two novels in this volume so that you may readily see both sides of the same coin. I took painstaking care to preserve the original thoughts, intents, British spellings, and wordings. Keep in mind that these works are a window into a different time period and do not cater to modern sensibilities.
Will you be inspired as Huxley and Orwell were to write your own novel expanding on these ideas? Do you see our current society rising to the peak of a Utopian mountain? Or will you resonate with the idea that we are spiraling toward a drain through which humanity must be flushed? Turn the page, flip the coin, but don’t forget to call it . . . heads . . . or tails?
—Amanda Montandon