The Sleeper Awakes, Suspended Animation, Time Travel

Pre-Radium-Age

* Julian Hawthorne, "June, 1993" (Cosmopolitan, February 1893). See Hawthorne entry.

1904-13

* TK

1914-23

* TK

1924-33

* William Salisbury, The Squareheads, The Story of a Socialized State: A Futuristic Novel (The Independent Publishing Co.: New Rochelle, NY, 1929). Norman Thraley, a stunt aviator experimenting with a rocket-propelled plane loses consciousness and wakes up in 2330. He has been in a coma for over 400 years. America is now the utopian/dystopian society of Usofmera, where everything is "four-square" — literally. Trees, fruit, architeture, even humans are cubic. Everyone walks in lock-step, the majority is always right. The state provides exactly the same food and housing for all. Etcetera. (See description in Science-Fiction: The Early Years.) More TK.

* John Lionel Tayler, The Last of My Race: A Dream of the Future (London, 1924). The narrator, a medical man of the 20th century, wakes up in the year 302,930. He is encouraged to write down his activities and sensations — then notices that the seeming humans who attend to his wants are perfect automatons. So are the flowers in the garden, and a tortoise that creeps about. (Hello, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?...) He also notices that the house — modeled after a 20th century home — is a sort of living organism that is aware of his thoughts and moods and responds to them. A superman — so evolved that the narrator can hardly bear his presence — pays him a call. He explains that 20th-century mankind (Homo ignorans) became extinct because his brain grew so large that his giant head prevented its passage through the birth canal. We learn all about the evolution of superior forms of mankind; very proto-Stapledon.

* John Bertin, Brood of Helios (Weird Stories, May 1932). Time trave to four million years in the future.