Gerald W Page's "The Happy Man" (novelette, free): A do-gooder is on a mission to awaken lazy men

This is the author's first published story.

Story summary.

There is a surprising twist near end, but most of the story is of a rebel loner trying to survive & help fix the ugly world he finds himself in. A world where people are either "sleepers" (sleeping forever in machine-tended "coffins", living in a personal utopia in their dreams), or "wakers" - rebels who prefer real world to the artificial. Most of the world is sleepers. Few wakers are mostly "patrolmen", forever rounding up non-patrolmen wakers & forcefully putting them in dream coffins!

Hal Nelson, hero of this story, is a non-patrolman waker who must survive, & has taken upon himself the mission to help the sleeping world wake up.

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, March 1963.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks.
Rating: B.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.