Event Details

Join us for the launch of Dr Brian Baker's new book An Invention, his reworking of H G Wells's The Time Machine in text and image.

This project is a full colour treatment of HG Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) using the styles of war artists and others in the period, often making direct reference to particular works, to create a refiguration of the relation between word, image and (art) history in narrating the story of a traumatised, displaced Traveller. An Invention, offers a story of a WW1 pilot who meets Sigmund Freud either in Vienna before the war, or in London after it, and in that interview tells his own strange story. The text uses a range of techniques to achieve its effects: pen, pencil, pastels, gouache, lino cut, collage, charcoal and ink wash.

An Invention was started in October 2018 and, as it developed through the Centenary commemorations for WW1, became much more focused on that conflict. In part the Traveller’s story, during which he is shot down and taken prisoner, intersects with that of Brian’s own Great-Grandfather, George Staples, who worked on the British Army’s railway system in France (having been a track inspector in civilian life) before being gassed, and dying upon his return home, in July 1918. The text became an oblique meditation upon trauma and loss, and also upon the Anglophone literature of the Great War.

Bio:

Brian Baker teaches literature, film and creative writing at Lancaster University, and lives in North Wales. He is a member of the Troiiica art group (https://www.troiiica.art) and has published creative and critical-creative works in The Lune Journal, Foundation, E.R.O.S., IceFloe Press and elsewhere. His first collection of visual poems, Argo-0, was published by Steel Incisors Press in 2022. His work can be found at https://www.brianbaker365.com/home and on Twitter/X @SciFiBaker.