“Lands in the sky–That they are nearby–”
So begins Charles Fort’s New Lands, thus laying the groundwork for every UFO book of the 1950s that suggested that we were being visited by aliens from Mars or Venus. Fort’s second major non-fiction work, New Lands, is a difficult book. It lacks the monumentality of The Book of the Damned, the wide and playful scope of Lo! or the immediacy of Wild Talents. And sometimes, when you read it, you can feel that Fort takes his ideas a bit too seriously – that he believes in alien visitors, nearby worlds in our planet’s atmosphere, and even a flat Earth. The aloofness from his own whimsical explanations that characterised The Book of the Damned is certainly less evident here.
That is not to say the book is not full of quotable aphorisms – one immediately thinks of the remark that a mirage of the Ohio town of Sandusky had been taken by some to show Heaven, and “those of us who have no desire to go to Sandusky may ponder that point” (chapter 27), or the paraphrase of Melville’s Moby Dick, “Char me the trunk of a redwood tree. Give me pages of white chalk cliffs to write upon. Magnify me thousands of times, and replace my trifling immodesties with a titanic megalomania – then might I write largely enough for our subjects.”1 But as poignant as the remarks are, the content of the book admittedly appears pretty outdated today. It is difficult to read Fort’s speculations on a small Universe with the planets nearby and the Sun rotating around the Earth without thinking he was some sort of crackpot. It’s the classic ‘difficult second album’ problem faced by pop musicians: you have 20 years to get your first record out, and then only a few for the second one.
The Book of the Damned was published in 1919 (see Ulrich Magin, ‘It Was One Hundred Years Ago Today’, FT386:38-43), and New Lands came out in 1923 – 100 years ago today, or close enough.
Facts, Fiction and Poetry
Little is known about the writing process: there are no drafts, and almost no correspondence. It was in 1920 when Fort and his wife Anna moved to London, taking up residence at 15 Marchmont Street, only a few hundred yards from the British Museum. Fort was working on there, going
