Lo! (The Works of Charles Fort) (Kindle Edition)

by Charles Fort (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In Lo!, Fort develops a theme of teleportation as an agency for many strange phenomena. He reviews the cases of the Marie Celeste, Princess Caraboo, Cagliostro, Ambrose Bierce, Agatha Christie, and Kaspar Hauser as evidence that people can be mysteriously teleported from one point to another. The main side effect of these accidental teleportations seems to be amnesia, in fact it is the sine qua non of the better examples.

Fort continues to tweak scientific pomposity, focusing on astronomers. While astronomy bills itself as an exact science, even today, with digital computers, calculations can go awry, often because of human error and the limits of our mathematical models. A Mars probe was lost because one software component was using English measurements instead of metric. While multi-body systems can now be simulated digitally using iterative methods, eventually chaos creeps in and makes predicting future locations of planets impossible. Fort uses this Achilles heel to advance his own modest cosmological proposal, of a shell of land just a few dozen miles up, with the stars as volcanoes...

Taken at face value, of course, he is dead wrong--even the builders of Stonehenge would have turned up their noses at this concept. However, Fort was vindicated in many large and small ways here. He predicted the space race, and how space travel would someday become commercialized and routine. His sense that the universe has a lot of strange components that early 20th century science had no concept of, was also prescient. Today, we might use parallel universes to explain many of these phenomena. In fact, some mainstream theories of physics demand the existence of such universes. In fact, some of these universes may be separated from ours by the spatial equivalent of millimeters. Somewhere, I think, Mr. Fort is a bit less grumpy... --J.B. Hare

From the Back Cover

Charles Fort's parade of scientific anomalies frames the larger anomaly that is human existence. "Lo!" is a book with the capacity to rewire brains and sculpt new lenses for seeing the unexpected, the unexplained--and perhaps for glimpsing our own role in Fort's mystifying cosmic scheme.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 376 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Evinity Publishing Inc; 1.0 edition (April 25, 2009)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0027P889G
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #19,496 in Kindle Store (See Bestsellers in Kindle Store)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, perhaps a little dense., April 27, 2000

By	Carrie Laben (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: LO! (The Garland library of science fiction) (Hardcover)

Charles Fort is considered the venerable grandfather of anomalistic literature, and with good reason - his works are a fantastical Sears-Roebuck of frogs falling from the sky, rocks thrown by invisible hands, spontaneous human combustion, and people who disappear and reappear at random. If you're going to be in the field at all, you should read your Fort.

Of course, that's not to say that he's perfect. Fort's tongue-in-cheek message about science and the nature of reality is easy to misunderstand, and he doesn't do anything to help the situation with a dense, run-on prone style of prose. For the researcher, his occasional lack of documentation is also frustrating.

All in all, though, this is definitely a book worth checking out if you can find it.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great book, January 26, 2002

By	rickey l. esteves sr "estevesbooks-o_livreiro" (san francisco, ca United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: LO! (The Garland library of science fiction) (Hardcover)

Being an avid reader of John Keel,Ivan Sanderson,Colin Wilson,etc.for the last 30 years I only recently began reading Mr.Fort himself.My first book that I read by him "the book of the damned" was interesting but quite disappointing when compared to people like Keel and such.However,"Lo!" on the other hand is just what I was looking for.A vast collection of Forteana.Weird rains,vampire attacks,ghosts,sea monsters and other creatures,disappearances,ufos-whatever you want,it's in there.This is a book that should keep you focused for hours on end as it is great reading.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lo!, March 18, 2006

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Lo! (Paperback)

It seems that many people's complaints about this book is that Mr. Fort never explains his exact view. However, this is what is so wonderful; he doesn't crowd out your own thoughts with his own dogmatic beliefs. He leaves room for you to draw your own conclusions. I'm 12 and I understand this book perfectly. Maybe it is that you need to open your mind to accept the unexplained, to have imagination. "We will pick up an existence by its frogs."