Other editions of book The Chronic Argonauts

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

In 1888, while a student, H.G. Wells published "The Chronic Argonauts," a 3-part story serialized in The Science Schools Journal. He would later return to the themes and recreate the story as the classic novel, The Time Machine. (After The Time Machine's publication, Wells tried to suppress "The Chronic Argonauts," going so far as buying all copies he could find and destroying them.) Today, the story is a rarity in its original publication, but it is hardly a classic work in the same vein as its successor novel. As a literary curiosity, it commands some interest, but do not go into it expecting anything on the scale of Wells's later, greater novels.

A third-person narrator describes the arrival of a mysterious inventor to the peaceful Welsh town of Llyddwdd. Dr. Moses Nebogipfel takes up residence in a house neglected after the deaths of its former inhabitants. The simple rural folk become apprehensive about Nebogipfel's activities in the house and suspect him of witchcraft. Ultimately they storm the inventor's "devilish" workshop. Nebogipfel 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 becomes a second narrator, relating in flashback the night of his disappearance, and a series of subsequent adventures with Nebogipfel. He reveals that Nebogipfel is an "Anachronic Man" whose genius drives him to seek out a time more suited to his abilities.

This brief story begins with a third-person account of the arrival of a mysterious inventor to the peaceful Welsh town of Llyddwdd. Dr. Nebogipfel takes up residence in a house sorely neglected after the deaths of its former inhabitants. The main bulk of the story concerns the apprehension of the simple rural folk who eventually storm the inventor's "devilish" workshop in an effort to repay supposed witchery.