H G Wells

The Chronic Argonauts Annotated H G Wells

"The Chronic Argonauts" is an 1888 short story by the British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells. It features an inventor who builds a time machine and travels in time using it, and it pre-dates Wels's best-selling 1895 time travel novel The Time Machine by seven years. A third-person narrator describes the arrival of a mysterious inventor in the inward-looking Welsh town of Dr. Moses l takes up residence in a house neglected after the deaths of its former inhabitants. The simple rural folk become apprehensive about activities in the house and suspect him of witchcraft. Ultimately they storm the inventor's "devilish" workshop escapes with the sympathetic Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook, in what is later revealed to be a time machine. The unnamed narrator later discovers the dazed Reverend Cook, who has been missing for three weeks. Cook then becomes a second narrator, relating in flashback the night of his disappearance, and a series of subsequent adventures in time with Nebogipfel. He reveals that Nebogipfel understands himself to be an "Ana chronic Man", a man whose genius drives him to seek out a time more suited to his abilities. A 'time loop' is implied, in which Nebogipfel went back to the past and killed the previous owners of the house, thus causing it to fall into ruin and enabling him to occupy it for his present-day experiments.