The Man Who Awoke

The Man Who Awoke was originally serialized in Wonder Stories in 1933 and collected in this Ballantine paperback edition in 1975. The novel follows Norman Winters, a wealthy banker who constructs a lead-shielded underground chamber to suspend himself in a cosmic-ray-free state, effectively hibernating across deep time. He awakens five times over roughly 25,000 years, each era presenting a radically different vision of humanity’s future. The first awakening finds a world of forest-dwelling communities who blame their ancestors for squandering fossil fuels. Later eras reveal a technocratic brain-cult, a civilization absorbed entirely in mechanical dream worlds, a society of isolated individualists raising children in jars, and finally a near-total regression into barbarism. Manning’s novel is a remarkably early treatment of resource depletion and environmental consequence, singled out by Isaac Asimov for its prescience in the introduction to Before the Golden Age (1974). 

Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ballantine 24367 ($1.50). New York: Ballantine Books, 1975. ISBN: 0345279697. #10623.
Fine.