The millennium sleeper

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The millennium sleeper (original title: The Man Who Awoke ) is a science fiction - novel by Laurence Manning , originally in five sequels in 1933 in the pulp magazine Wonder Stories appeared. It tells the story of a man who uses a drug to plunge himself into sleep for thousands of years. This happens five times, and after each awakening the sleeper is confronted with a new level of human civilization and with its problems. The novel is considered a classic example of the sleeper subject .

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Part One: The Forest People

The inexplicable disappearance of Norman Winters, a wealthy banker who is also very interested in scientific questions, is reported in the prehistory. When his son confronts the gardener because of his suspicious behavior on the day of his disappearance, the latter finally hands over a letter in which the father tells the son that he should stop looking for him and that he has decided to try a risky experiment whereby he hopes to see with his own eyes the achievements of science in a distant future. Following the theory that life processes depend directly on the effects of cosmic rays , he built a secret underground chamber, heavily shielded with lead, with the help of the gardener, where he can sink into a death-like sleep with the help of a drug and a clock mechanism using X-rays awakened, hope to awaken again after thousands of years.

The experiment succeeds and Winter awakens 3,000 years later in a world in which there are no more cities and people have become forest dwellers who no longer do agriculture and only eat the fruits of the forest. Humanity lives in small, subsistence farming communities, in a kind of radical ecological idyll. At first you don't want to believe that it comes from the past, only the presence of chest hair and an appendix - both features that have since disappeared - can convince the forest dwellers. Now the curiosity is great and he is asked to report what life was like in that “age of waste” from which he comes. However, Winter is not aware that a political conflict about the use of resources is coming to a head in the community of which he is a guest, in which the “Council of Youth” insists that certain resources - these are food trees that are not yet fully ready for harvest - be seen as their inheritance and remain intact. When Winter reported to the youth meeting that trees were burned in his day, that was viewed as a provocation, and Winter was barely able to save himself from the angry crowd. He goes back to his room and falls asleep again.

Part Two: Master of the Brain

Shortly after Winter has awakened from his second sleep phase of now 5,000 years - one writes about 10,000 AD - and begins to explore the apparently uninhabited world, he is captured by an airship. He learns that like other “wildlings” he will be brought into the city, where he will want for nothing, provided that he submits to the customs of a society controlled by a large, mechanical brain. This includes one hour of work per week, consisting of rather trivial control tasks, the rest of the time is devoted to practiced hedonism , including visiting “pleasure palaces”, which are described as a kind of futuristic swinger club . All of this under the watchful eye of the brain, which has its sensors installed everywhere and makes sure that no one is out of line and, above all, that no unauthorized person gets near it. Anyone who has been in the city for a period of time will find it impossible to even approach the "Temple of the Brain" due to some kind of psychological compulsion emanating from the brain. Winter comes into contact with an underground movement that asks him to do what they can't, namely install a sabotage device in one of the brain's feed rooms. The attack succeeds, the brain goes insane and with it the people who storm the temple of the brain and completely destroy the mechanical-electrical ruler. Out of gratitude for the revolutionary deed, Winter is building a new, atomic-powered bedroom, into which he goes to see what will have become of the liberated civilization in another 5,000 years.

Part Three: The City of Sleep

Another 5,000 years in the future, winter will find a depopulated world. 15,000 AD the climate has become warmer and in the latitudes of what was once New York there are now subtropical temperatures. In the seemingly almost deserted cities there are a few million "dreamers", each one with all of his sensory nerves connected to machines via countless fine wires that simulate a dream reality in which all the dreams of the dreamer find fulfillment. This virtual reality technology was originally developed for the blind. Soon it was so perfected that it was possible to live with all your senses in a computer-generated dream world that was indistinguishable from reality. A large part of the population fell into this lure and only a handful of scientists devote themselves to the maintenance of dream machines and the care of dreamers, whose bodies, kept alive only with electrical energy, deteriorate over time and begin to resemble dried-up mummies when completely atrophied . The birth rate is steadily declining and humanity is facing slow but sure self-extinction.

Winter succeeds in persuading a small group of mostly young scientists to escape from this dream prison. This succeeds and at a remote place in the jungle a new city is built with the help of atomic machines, in the hope that the beginning of a new future for mankind will be realized here. Winter does not want to stay, however, but goes into a radiation-protected chamber built by his new friends in order to skip another 5000 years.

This part has a precursor in the in May 1930 in Science Wonder Stories story published The City of the Living Dead , the Manning along with Fletcher Pratt wrote. Here, too, a curious adventure finds a city with apparently lifeless bodies wrapped in fine wires that have surrendered to a life of dream illusion. Aside from the concept of the sleepers submerged in a virtual reality, the framework of the story is very different from that in The Millennium Sleeper .

Part Four: individualists (The Individualists)

In the year 20,000 AD, the perfection of atomic machines made cooperation unnecessary. People have become radical individualists who pursue their goals without any consideration for others and are not afraid to kill one another. Each individual has his "living machine" that meets all of his needs. When winter awakens in this world, he is captured by the biologist Hargry, who wants to examine him and finally dissect him. Other, similarly unscrupulous scientists are after Winter and fight each other with their machines to get Winter's possession. Hargry's machine is a huge mobile fortress moving on three steel legs more than 1,000 feet high. Hargry locks Winter in a kind of mirror cabinet that he built as a prison for his producer Bengue. In this future, humans will no longer be conceived and born, but bred in glass containers by biologists such as Hargry and Bengue. If at some point the breeding results seem insufficient or imperfect to their creators, they are safely destroyed again. As advanced as this future biology may be, it has not succeeded in significantly extending human life, which may also be due to the lack of cooperation between scientists, who consider it perfectly normal and reasonable to jealous the results of their research in front of their competitors to hide. The fact that the human lifespan is still barely more than 100 years is also the reason that mankind has not been able to leave the solar system, as the journey to the next star would take 200 years.

Ultimately, Winter manages to escape from the “City of Mirrors” together with Bengue, and Winter manages to escape to his underground lead chamber, where he is safe from Hargry's pursuits. Again he sinks into a long sleep.

Part Five: The Elixir

When winter wakes up after another 5,000 years, a group of researchers is in the process of perfecting the recipe for eternal youth and winter is one of the first to undergo the treatment. The now rejuvenated winter embarks on a millennia-long series of interstellar journeys that have now become possible through human longevity. Finally, unfulfilled with the experiences of his endless existence, he hears of a man named Condonal, who settled on a planet orbiting its sun in bound rotation . Together with many others, he built a temple on the border between the day and night hemispheres, in which the project is being pursued to create a higher level of consciousness in order to ultimately clarify the question of the meaning of life . After all, this project is being pursued by a large part of interstellar humanity on countless planets, and Winter also finds his destiny here and the task with which he is content to spend the rest of eternity.

reception

The story, originally published in five sequels in the pulp magazine Wonder Stories , was summarized as a novel in 1975. The fix-up shows no significant changes compared to the series. He is considered an early example of "green", that is, ecological topics dealing with science fiction, which of course mainly refers to the first part of the forest inhabitants . Manning has been compared here with Olaf Stapledon , because the novel, like Stapledon's The Last and First Men , describes the stages of a history of human development in a large arc spanning many millennia. The last chapter with the cosmic search for the ultimate goal of creation and the essence of the Creator is again reminiscent of Stapledon's The Star Maker .

The ecologically oriented forest dwellers of part 1, the computer-controlled surveillance state of part 2, getting lost in the illusions of a virtual reality in part 3 and finally the search for transcendence in part 5: here Manning as the author of the golden era of SF has several subjects that were marginal in his time but would become central topics of science fiction in later decades. Hrotic writes: "Imagine speculating on what a Gernsback-era author would have written for a later generation — this is essentially what we have with The Man Who Awoke ."  

expenditure

  • First print: The Man Who Awoke. 5 sequels in Wonder Stories , published March to August 1933.
  • US first edition: The Man Who Awoke. Ballantine Books, 1975, ISBN 0-345-24367-6 .
  • UK first edition: The Man Who Awoke. Sphere, 1977, ISBN 0-7221-5735-5 .
  • Contained in: Isaac Asimov (Ed.) :: Before the Golden Age. Doubleday, 1977, ISBN 0-385-02419-3 .
  • German: The millennial sleeper. Heyne Science Fiction & Fantasy # 3529, 1977, ISBN 3-453-30395-4 .

literature

  • Everett Franklin Bleiler , Richard Bleiler: Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Kent State University Press, Kent, OH 1998, ISBN 0-585-23982-7 , pp. 271-273.
  • Steven Hrotic: Religion in Science Fiction: The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a Genre. A&C Black, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4725-2745-5 , pp. 127-130.
  • Michael Page: Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age. In: Gerry Canavan, Kim Stanley Robinson (Eds.): Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-8195-7428-2 , pp. 42-45.
Reviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Everett Franklin Bleiler, Richard Bleiler: Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Kent State University Press, Kent, OH 1998, ISBN 0-585-23982-7 , pp. 277 f ..
  2. ↑ The City of the Living Dead in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database .
  3. ↑ a b Steven Hrotic: Religion in Science Fiction: The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a genre. A&C Black, 2014, p. 127.
  4. ↑ Michael Page: Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age. In: Gerry Canavan, Kim Stanley Robinson (Eds.): Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-8195-7428-2 , pp. 42 f.