Science Fiction Book Review: The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning

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I bought a job lot of vintage science fiction books recently, which included this one. When I buy job lots of books, some I read and keep and others I sell on. I wasn't familiar with this book, or the author, so I thought I'd give it a try. First published in 1933, this is the story of Norman Winters, a super-rich banker and amateur biologist who finds a way to put himself into suspended animation for extremely long periods of time. Driven by an intense curiosity about how the future of humanity will unfold, he secretly constructs a hidden underground chamber and in the year 1950 he takes a drug he's concocted to put himself into a state of deep hibernation, to awake over 3,000 years later. This novel was originally published as a series fo five short stories, which follow on from each other. Winters wakes up in the year 5,000. He finds that there's a large forest growing in the place of New York, and finding a road he follows it until he meets an inhabitant of this new era. He finds a civilisation that has abandoned heavy industry and reliance on fossil fuels, and believes in living in balance with nature, harvesting what they need from the forests. It's not a technologically backward society, they have long range communications and aircraft, but progress has slowed right down and Winters is struck by how lacklustre the people are - they do the minimal amount of work to live comfortable lives, and don't seem to want anything more. Even so, there is one big political division, between the young and the old - and Winters' arrival in this society triggers open violence between the two factions, with himself in the middle. Retreating back to his hidden chamber, he puts himself in suspended animation for another 5,000 years, hoping that the world will have made some progress in that time. In the year 10,000, Winters wakes up to find what appears to be a more advances society, but of course there's a flaw. The population now lives in large, well-run cities, which are run by "the Brain" - what we would call a supercomputer. The Brain was originally constructed centuries earlier, and gradually became more and more powerful until it ended up running all parts of society. The people mostly seem to be content with this setup, as they do very little work. Each person is assigned to a light, undemanding job which mostly consists of overseeing machines, pushing buttons and adjusting controls as needed. There's so little to do at work that they're able to spend most of their time chatting or watching TV. And that's only for one week every couple of months. The rest of the time is spent at leisure, which consist exclusively of getting drunk and having promiscuous sex - a hedonist's paradise. But there's nothign else to do, and intellectual entertainments aren't encouraged. Winters theorises that the Brain is just keeping the population distracted until it's in a position to get rid of humanity completely. He's recruited into an underground group that wants to overthrow the Brain, and manages to sabotage it with ridiculous ease, setting the stage for a successful uprising followed by the establishment of a new human government on what appears to be technocratic lines. Wanting to see how society will develop now it's back in human hands, Winters goes back into hybernation. In the year 15,000, Winters awakes again to find that humanity has gone down another dead end. Science has developed to the point where people can be kept asleep and fed dreams which allow them to experience their ideal lives. This technique has become overwhelmingly popular, and the result is that most of the human race spend their lives comatose and dreaming, overseen by a small class of scientists. But the scientist class are themselves in decline, as more of their numbers each generation choose to join the dreamers. It's not sustainable, and no progress is being made. Winters helps a small group of these scientists escape from the city that they oversee and set up a self-sufficient colony in the wilderness, in the hopes of establishing a new civilisation. You may have noticed by now that Winters has a knack of waking up at key points in history. Leapfrogging another five millenia, Winters next wakes up in the year 20,000, and the world is in a state of almost total chaos. Government doesn't exist anymore, and the family unit has been replaced by artificial breathing. Nobody considers that they have any obligations to others anymore, and everyone lives for personal gain and glory. Winters is captured by a scientst who wants to use him for in his experiments, as humanity has now evolved somewhat beyond 20th Century humans (no teeth or appendixes anymore). Incidentally, this evil scientist gets around in a large, three-legged vehicle that's referred to as a "fighting machine" - anyone who's read War of the Worlds will spot the similarity. Escaping with his life, but not having done anything to change the overall situation, Winters goes into hybernation for one last time. The last section of the book has Winters waking up in the year 25,000. Humanity seems to have finally evolved a true civilisation, which is still an anarchy, but which functions a lot better than the civilisation of 5,000 years earlier. With no government, society is based on two rules - everyone respects each other's rights, and you don't refuse help to someone in need. People follow those rules volunarily because dong so has been found to have survival advantages. The first person that Winters meets is a scientist who just so happens to have perfected an operation that rejuvenates people, so anyone who wants can now be immortal. The rest of the story concerns Winters himself becoming immortal and pursuing a quest to find whether humanity has an ultimate purpose. I understand that Laurence Manning gave up writing not long after writing this book, and I can understand why. It's not a boring book, there was enough action and social speculation to maintain my interest while I was reading it, but it's badly flawed. The dialogue is stilted and overly formal, the character motivations are only barely sketched out, and the science is pretty dodgy even by early 30s standards. I don't regret reading it, but I won't bother reading it again. It's going in the pile to re-sell. 3/10.