Night & Demons
“My friend Manly Wade Wellman told me that F. Orlin Tremaine, the editor of Astounding from 1933 till John W. Campbell took over at the end of 1938, had bought the rights to Fort’s collection Lo! to mine for story ideas. I’m not sure that’s true, but Tremaine certainly did serialize the book. I didn’t see a pulp magazine until one of my high school teachers loaned me a couple issues of Weird Tales, but as a teenager I read lots of SF from the period in anthologies.
Fort’s technique was to go through scientific journals and note oddities which he then retailed in four volumes beginning with The Book of the Damned. He threw out a number of speculations on what caused the data he reported: “I think we’re property,’’ or “Perhaps somebody is collecting Ambroses,’’ which are familiar even to people who don’t have the faintest notion of where the phrases come from. Personally, I’m convinced that Fort was joking—that is, that he believed the items were as true as anything else you’d find repor...ted in, say, Nature, but that he understood the causes of the phenomena he reported were unknowable on the available data.MoreLess
Fort’s technique was to go through scientific journals and note oddities which he then retailed in four volumes beginning with The Book of the Damned. He threw out a number of speculations on what caused the data he reported: “I think we’re property,’’ or “Perhaps somebody is collecting Ambroses,’’ which are familiar even to people who don’t have the faintest notion of where the phrases come from. Personally, I’m convinced that Fort was joking—that is, that he believed the items were as true as anything else you’d find repor...ted in, say, Nature, but that he understood the causes of the phenomena he reported were unknowable on the available data.MoreLess
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