The Man Who Awoke

The Man Who Awoke was originally serialized in Wonder Stories in 1933 and first collected in book form by Ballantine in 1975. Norman Winters, a wealthy banker and amateur scientist, constructs a lead-shielded underground chamber in which he can suspend himself for thousands of years, awakening five times to observe humanity's future. What he finds is a succession of civilizations built around solutions to problems of his own age, each carrying its solution toward a troubling extreme. His first awakening finds a society shaped by the exhaustion of fossil fuels and other natural resources, where conservation has become an almost fanatical creed and Winters is condemned as a representative of the wasteful twentieth century. Later ages have surrendered political judgment to an all-knowing mechanical Brain, retreated almost entirely into artificial dream worlds, and reduced society to isolated individuals whose children are raised communally in jars. Manning's futures anticipate a remarkable range of later dystopian concerns, including resource depletion, machine government, artificial reality, technological dependence, and the erosion of family and social life. The final section carries the novel beyond these political and technological dystopias. After science conquers aging and humanity spreads through the universe, Winters discovers that unlimited life and material abundance have not answered the most basic question of all: what purpose does human existence serve? He joins a community attempting to create a higher form of collective consciousness, reasoning that just as cooperating cells produced a creature capable of thought, cooperating human minds might produce a new intelligence capable of understanding what human reason cannot. Manning leaves the experiment unresolved, with Winters spending millennia pursuing an answer that remains tantalizingly beyond reach. The result is an unusually ambitious early genre work, less concerned with predicting particular technologies than with asking whether progress can eliminate scarcity, labor, suffering, uncertainty, and even death without also eliminating something necessary to a meaningful human life.

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