Awakened - Laura Elliott

Believing in an idea put forward in a science-fiction story is a matter of investment and putting aside preconceived ideas. Real life experience of a pandemic, the increasing evidence of climate change, lockdowns and some recent political events have certainly forced people to re-evaluate the possibility of a breakdown of society and adapting to life in a post-apocalyptic world. I initially found it difficult to put aside a sense of disbelief with the premise behind the disaster that has occurred in Awakened, but having seen how science, business and politics have twisted ideas of moral behaviour in the name of expedience, productivity and growth, it's perhaps not so far-fetched after all.

The principle behind Awakened is that society has significantly "changed", or to put it another way, completely broken down due to an ill-advised experiment with sleeplessness. Considering that the scientific knowledge of the benefits and necessity of sleep is already out there and beyond any dispute, and that the effects of sleep deprivation are well-known and experienced regularly by many unfortunate people and probably everyone at one time or another, it seems unlikely that any corporation would develop a drug to ensure that humans can exist and effectively double the productivity of their lives without having to waste downtime sleeping.

But that's exactly what has happened when the Orex Corporation received FDA approval - surely it could not have passed stringent health and safety requirements and thorough testing? - to roll out a programme where an inserted neuralchip allows users to go without sleep - at least for significant periods of time. It has been tested first on soldiers for the benefits it would undoubtedly offer the military, which is sort of half-way believable. Needless to say its wider use in the general public has all gone horribly wrong by the start of Awakened. It takes a little time to understand how and why, but the immediate situation we find ourselves in is with a small group of scientists holed up in the Tower of London at the behest of an 'Anonymous Billionaire'. They are currently conducting tests on a "subject", presumably in search of a cure or at least a better idea of what they are facing, because the scale of the problem in the world outside soon becomes clear.

As for why this wasn't tested thoroughly, well the rationale is actually a good one, that the tests were done on increased lengths of sleeplessness time, but considering what we already know about the sleep deprivation, no-one thought that anyone would ever consider total sleeplessness. There is however, as we have learned, always someone willing to do the unthinkable for their own benefit. "Human greed has always outstripped human needs", Thea observes at one point. The science and testing might appear be lacking rigour in the use of these neuralchips, but there is enough here to give benefit of doubt and consider instead the wider implications. Those implications as depicted here in Awakened are scary.

But we have to wait to really get any idea of the impact and scale of the problem of the Sleepless. Thea, one of the scientists in the Tower of London, is the narrator here and between philosophising on the nature of science and society and revisiting memories, is haunted by visions and hallucinations and dreams of her mother who was one of the first to fall to the sleeping sickness. Gradually we begin to piece together some clues about what is happening outside from an interview she conducts with one of the two new subjects who have turned up at the Tower. They are not typical of the feral population that now lives outside, but not human as we know it either. Could humans or the Sleepless possibly have evolved to a new stage?

Laura Elliott's writing - though her troubled narrator - rarely confronts events directly. While the reader might want to know more about the apocalyptic horrors in the outside world, the author avoids sensationalism and instead uses parallels, historical examples and Thea's own thoughts and experiences to probe at the underlying moral and social questions. At a certain stage in her interviews with Vladimir, you wonder who is really being examined, which one exhibits the truer response of human nature. There is not much in the way of conventional plot as such, no development and very little conventional character development. The other scientists are clearly defined but it's hard to really sympathise or relate to them, restricted as we are by Thea's growing unease with what is going on around her and her inability to relate to them.

The writing however is more revealing than we might think and it's not short on incident or shocks either. Little by little, we gain a gradual picture of the slow progress of a scientists' study and discovery (and not getting very far), but at the same time the novel expands outwards (or possibly inwards), gaining weight by the accumulation of detail, drawing you deeper into it, intriguing like a waking dream. Whether it resolves itself in a realistic or satisfactory way, or whether it succumbs itself to a withdrawal from any familiar reality will depend on the reader's expectations, but the direction of travel - in terms of how and why this happened - already indicates an outcome that we might just have to come to terms with based on what we know of humanity now and what to expect of it in the future.

Reading notes: Awakened by Laura Elliott is published by Angry Robot on the 10th June 2025. My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance eBook copy for review. For the sake of  not introducing spoilers the last lines of the review might appear ambiguous, I think the book is terrific in how it develops, I didn't like how it ended, but in many respects, the conclusion is perhaps inevitable.