“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling”

The epigraph “I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling,” attributed to H. G. Wells, casts temporal passage as an experience of bodily distress and disorientation. Placed before the first chapter, it makes those costs the reader’s first point of entry into the novel.

Wording and Attribution

The sentence is presented as a statement by H. G. Wells. Its phrasing assumes an earlier explanation—the speaker has “already told you”—so the line sounds like a fragment of an ongoing account rather than a self-contained definition. The epigraph offers no further context for that prior telling; its effect rests on the blunt pairing of sickness with confusion.

Position and Narrative Effect

The epigraph precedes the chapter heading “THE HAPTICS.” That placement makes the warning a threshold into the narrative, where time travel is framed not as a clean technical marvel but as something with physical and cognitive consequences. The evidence establishes this as an opening frame, not as a description of a particular character’s experience or a specific time-travel episode.

Significance

By foregrounding illness and disorientation before the story begins, the epigraph primes the reader to approach temporal displacement as destabilizing. Its compactness also leaves the warning unresolved: it names the cost without explaining its cause or scope, allowing the novel’s unfolding account to supply the context.