Lo!: Encyclopedia II - Lo! - Overview

Lo! - Overview

Of Fort's four books, this volume deals most frequently and scathingly with astronomy (continuing from his previous book New Lands). The book also deals extensively with other subjects, including paranormal phenomena (see parapsychology), which was explored in his first book, The Book of the Damned. Fort is widely credited to have coined the now-popular term teleportation in this book, and here he ties his previous statements on what he referred to as the Super-Sargasso Sea into his beliefs on teleportation. He would later expand this theory to include purported mental and psychic phenomena in his forth and final book, Wild Talents".

It takes its derisive title from the tendency of astronomers in Fort's days to make positivistic, overly precise, and premature announcements of celestial events and discoveries. Fort portrays them as quack prophets, sententiously pointing towards the skies -- inaccurately, as events turn out.

Lo! is arguably Fort's most popular book, and it's easy to see why: the book deals with an extremely wide and diverse range of phenomena (as can be seen below), and Fort by now has a clearly established (if still somewhat shaky) theorem to go on. His book is divided into two sections: the first on the above phenomena; the second, on his abovementioned attacks on astronomy. The reason for this is that Fort had been working on a follow-up to The Book of the Damned, but he scrapped the idea and incorporated many of the subjects into this one.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki