Chronic Argonauts

Before The Time Machine there was this: Wells's first daring experiment in moving through the years, and the earliest fully imagined mechanism for crossing time in all of literature.

First published in 1888 in the Science Schools Journal, this early novella introduces Dr Moses Nebogipfel, a strange inventor who arrives in a remote Welsh village and builds a device to carry him across the centuries. Written when H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946) was still a young student, it is the rough, brilliant seed from which The Time Machine would grow seven years later. Gothic in mood and startling in ambition, it stands as a landmark in the birth of modern speculative writing.