Baker, Brian (2022) Argo-0:A doctored text. Steel Incisors.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Arg-0 is a treatment of HG Wells’ short story ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, which he wrote while a miserable schoolmaster in Holt, North Wales, and was published in 1888 in the Royal College of Science student magazine The Science Schools Journal. The story is a forerunner to The Time Machine, and elements of the final section of the story appear in the novel almost verbatim. ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ is a much more mysterious, even occultic story, set in a small village in North Wales (though Wells makes up all the names except for the village of Llanrwst), and the inventor figure, Dr Nebogipfel, much more like the fin-de-siècle anti-heroes of the Gothic. The pages here are not sequential but form an interrelated set. They are paper-based collages/ redactions and the visibility of the ‘pages’ is an important aesthetic principle. The materials are paper, charcoal, pencil, ink and gouache.