H.G. Wells
Victorian science fiction at a sleeping pace: time travel, Martians, and where to begin.
H.G. Wells wrote his most famous scientific romances in the 1890s, and the period prose is what makes them usable at night. Big ideas arrive through long, measured description: machinery explained, landscapes surveyed, futures walked through at a stroll.
The Time Machine is the entry point. It is short, the Traveler narrates calmly even at the end of the world, and both shows carry it, with Elizabeth Grace on The Sleepy Bookshelf and Andrew Bond on Send Me To Sleep. Tales of Space and Time offers five separate leaps instead of one; each story stands alone, so there is nothing to hold in memory overnight.
The War of the Worlds is the tense one, split here into two books read by Andrew Bond. Book One brings the strange lights down over the English countryside; Book Two crosses a ruined England. Plenty of people sleep fine through an alien invasion told this quietly. If you are not one of them, keep the Martians for the afternoon and let the Time Traveler handle the nights.
