Note: H. G. Wells read this story promptly, if his acknowledgment in an 1898 interview is correct. It was one source for The War of the Worlds (1897), contracted August 1895, in that it inspired his "vision of 'an empty and depopulated London' ". "Wells explored alternative ways of 'how to get London still and empty' " and settled on flight from an invasion by creatures from another planet, the latter an idea from his brother. --based on Peter J. Beck, The War of the Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2016; ISBN 1474229891), chapter 7 (viewed at Google Books); quotations from Beck, who quotes the interview

Synopsis: Reviewed in The Scotsman 1895-07-08 p3 "New Novels" as an adventure story rather than a dream story. "A purely fantastic vein has never been more thoroughly worked out ... The book recounts a series of wildly impossible adventures, in which the hero and narrator is abandoned at sea, [... several more,] comes to London, and finds all animation stopped there as in the Sleeping Palace of the nursery tale, sets this right, and thereafter makes another fortune by doctoring a Derby winner. There is no reason in the book why the series of adventures should begin where it does or end where it does; [... despite ingenious incidents] there is but a poorly equipped imagination revealed in the book as a whole."