Jim Steinmeyer, CHARLES FORT. Scotland on Sunday, May 25, 2008. Review by Andrew Crumey.

NOT many people get a whole new concept named after them, but Charles Fort did. On a snowy night in 1931, the reclusive 57-year-old author was lured to a rare public appearance at a New York hotel, expecting to launch his latest book. In fact, it was the inaugural dinner of a group dedicated to investigating paranormal phenomena from spontaneous human combustion to UFOs: the Fortean Society.

Long before The X-Files, Fort was, as Steinmeyer's excellent biography dubs him, "the man who invented the supernatural".

Steinmeyer attributes Fort's character to his troubled childhood: he and his two younger brothers were harshly treated by their domineering father.

Determined to pursue a literary career, Fort became a journalist in his teens, travelled extensively, married his childhood sweetheart and earned a meagre living in New York as a short-story writer. His break came when he was discovered by novelist Theodore Dreiser, who thought Fort looked "almost a duplicate of Oliver Hardy", but with the genius of Edgar Allen Poe. Encouraged by Dreiser, Fort published a realistic portrayal of working-class life, The Outcast Manufacturers. "In spite of its faults," writes Steinmeyer, "the novel is refreshing and addictive."

Yet Fort was still unsure of himself, keeping "boxes of metaphors, tens of thousands of little pieces of paper on which were written descriptive sentences... searching for a system that would guarantee success".

At the age of 39, he embarked on "a new sort of education". Instead of metaphors, he began filing information gleaned from New York Public Library. Some items defied classification: luminous rain; sea-water traces on the Sphinx; footprints of unknown creatures...

He came up with an explanation. The people of Mars, he claimed, are controlling us with energy rays. "I've given up fiction," Fort wrote to Dreiser. "I am convinced that everything is a fiction."

Dreiser thought Fort's new work, X, was "one of the greatest books I have ever read". But it was never published, nor its successor, Y, in which Fort attributed Earth's wonders to an intelligence at the North Pole. Fort destroyed both manuscripts. Fort's great innovation, so influential on all subsequent writers about the paranormal, was that instead of trying to come up with an explanation, he would simply present the "evidence", leaving readers to make up their own minds.

The result, in 1919, was The Book Of The Damned, a survey of weird phenomena that replaces grand theories with total relativism. Maybe frogs fall down on us from a sea in space - maybe not. Fort offered extracts from published sources to create a bamboozling picture of the inexplicable.

Screenwriter Ben Hecht thought it brilliant, the work of "an inspired clown", while HG Wells judged Fort "one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of the way newspapers". In The Book Of The Damned, and three more books that followed, Fort presented himself (and his readers) as the open-minded antidote to scientific certainty. Even Catholics approved of his swipes at Darwin, not noticing his equally heavy swipes at religion. Another devotee was the novelist Booth Tarkington, mistakenly described by Steinmeyer as Nobel Prize-winning, though his Pulitzer made him an influential ally.

Ever the shy recluse, Fort lived out his remaining years in New York with the wife he called "Momma", no children, but a number of parrots (he considered writing a book about them). His inventions included "topeacho" - a preserve made of tomatoes and peaches - and a form of draughts using 400 pieces on a board of 800 squares.

He never approved of the word "Fortean", but coined another, "teleportation". He died of leukaemia in 1932, his last words an enigmatic plea to his absent friend: "Drive them out, Dreiser, drive them out!"

Steinmeyer has produced a meticulously researched, marvellously readable window on the life of this extraordinary man. Was he a genius or a crank? Fort's message is that we should not always seek solutions, because there might be none. That is Steinmeyer's verdict on the man himself. v

Richard Holmes, THE AGE OF WONDER. Scotland on Sunday, October 5, 2008. Review by Andrew Crumey.

MOST people know that the Hollywood version of Frankenstein is very different from Mary Shelley's original creation. Far less well known is that the reinvention was not done by Hollywood; it happened during Mary's own lifetime, in stage versions that she saw herself. The age of Romanticism, as Richard Holmes reveals in this magnificent historical survey, was an age of wonder and fear as people woke up to the sudden advances in science.

Holmes is best known as a biographer of English Romantic poets, and this interest ties with surprising ease into the science of the period. Keats wrote that on reading Homer he felt like "some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken", and any reader in 1817 could immediately recognise this as a reference to William Herschel's discovery of Uranus 26 years previously.

Herschel is a key figure in this book, his career exemplifying the fluid nature of Romantic art and science. He started out as a composer in Hanover, then moved (like Handel) to England to further his musical career. Instead he found himself taking up astronomy, and with the help of his sister Caroline went on to discover not only Uranus, but also thousands of nebulae which he rightly took to be "island universes" - galaxies beyond our own - presumably hosting intelligent life. He inferred there was nothing special about Earth or humanity; an idea that made the young Percy Bysshe Shelley become an atheist.

Holmes structures his book through the lives of Herschel and other leading players, starting with Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook to Tahiti and went on to serve as president of the Royal Society for four decades. There is also the ill-fated Scottish explorer Mungo Park, and the chemist Humphry Davy, famous in his lifetime not only for the safety lamp, but also for Royal Institution lectures that made him a public figure akin to Dawkins or Hawking in our own age.

Something that links these disparate personalities is the idea of solitary exploration. Banks's expedition was a collaborative effort, but he gladly sponsored the "natural loner" Park, whose Travels In The Interior Of Africa established him, Holmes writes, as "the essential Romantic explorer". Herschel, too, valued solitude, to the point of obsession, though he could not have worked without the assistance of his long-suffering sister, as Holmes touchingly describes. And Davy did much of his work alone, or else left his lab and his wife to go fly-fishing. According to Holmes, Davy's last book, Consolations In Travel, is "one of the most extraordinary books of the late Romantic period".

Mary Shelley fictionalised the image of the lone explorer in Frankenstein, even taking the scientist and his creation to the icy wastes of the Alps. In the book, there is none of the life-giving electrical apparatus we know from film; these were inspired by reanimation experiments done in the 1820s. Mary was never consulted about the changes made in the stage versions, but nor did she object.

The focus on lives and personalities makes this a lively and engrossing read, though some of the themes can feel forced, such as a digression on the craze for ballooning. This is very much an Anglo-centric account, in which major European figures such as Rousseau, Schiller or Goethe appear only marginally. Holmes does, though, make the suggestion that a model for Victor Frankenstein may have been Johann Ritter, a German physicist whose possible influence on the music of Robert Schumann was noted in Charles Rosen's The Romantic Generation.

What Holmes does convey, quite brilliantly, is the interconnectedness of intellectual life at the time. Humphry Davy was related through marriage to Walter Scott, who knew Mungo Park. Visitors to Herschel's observatory included Joseph Haydn (who went on to compose The Creation) and Byron. When Herschel died in 1822, the long obituary in the Gentlemen's Magazine was immediately followed by a short notice on the drowned Percy Shelley.

If a single unifying thesis does not emerge from this book, perhaps it is because there cannot be one. Instead we have a splendid joining together of numerous parts to form a vivid picture of the times.

Jo Marchant, DECODING THE HEAVENS. Scotland on Sunday, November 2, 2008. Review by Andrew Crumey.

AMONG the priceless marble figures and decorated pots of Athens' National Archeological Museum stands a small object far less eye-catching but a great deal more mysterious. Jacques Cousteau and Arthur C Clarke were fascinated by it, and the physicist Richard Feynman made a point of seeing it when he visited the museum in 1980, to the bemusement of a curator who couldn't understand what was so interesting about a small lump of green corroded bronze. Yet according to Jo Marchant, this 2,000-year-old artefact was the world's first computer.

The 'Antikythera mechanism' takes its name from the Greek island in whose waters it was found by sponge divers in 1901. They had chanced upon the wreck of what was probably a Roman ship filled with booty from Rhodes, and what caught the divers' attention were the numerous statues that had made up a large part of the ship's cargo. In an age when archaeology was more about treasure hunting than science, they lifted whatever they could, leaving no record of where exactly the bits had all come from. Among the artefacts was the innocuous-looking mechanism, whose pieces ended up in a box in the basement of the Athens museum, while the statues were proudly put on display. It would be decades before the machine's significance became apparent.

Marchant's book gets off to a similarly slow start, with a history of Greek sponge diving that sets a pattern for what follows. As a writer for New Scientist and a trained biologist, she is on top of the technicalities of the story, but the amplifications and digressions are too plentiful. Most readers of this book will either know already how carbon dating works, or else won't want to be told in too much detail. What they want to know is how the world's first computer worked, and whether it fell out of a space ship.

That was the view of Erich von Däniken, who in his 1968 bestseller Chariots Of The Gods? proclaimed that the device was beyond anything the ancient Greeks could have made. He did not explain, though, why the aliens inscribed it with Greek words and symbols that fix its date of manufacture to about 100BC. Yet it did have something to do with space.

As Marchant explains, the fragmentary remains were enough to show an astronomical connection, possibly as an aid to navigation or calendar-keeping. But for classical historians of the early 20th century, it was an oddity that didn't fit in with existing knowledge, so they largely ignored it. This is Marchant's most telling point: when scholars have a choice between rewriting their books or dismissing evidence, they are more likely to choose the latter. It was left to a few amateur enthusiasts to try to solve the mystery.

The wreck itself attracted Arthur C Clarke, a keen diver, and subsequently Cousteau, who visited it on his ship Calypso but failed to find anything new. The real progress was made by mathematicians and engineers who took up the challenge of the mechanism's fused and broken gears.

Marchant's narrative takes on a human-interest angle as these scientists' stories unfold, given the obsession they shared and the rivalries that grew up between some of them. It would make a wonderful TV documentary, if only they were all still alive and able to be interviewed. Instead the book feels like a documentary without pictures, which is particularly unfortunate in the case of the mechanism. There are some photographs and diagrams, but not enough, making it hard while reading to keep a clear image of the object at the centre of the story.

Despite these reservations, this is an informative and thoroughly researched book that avoids sensationalising the subject. Work on the mechanism continues: X-rays show it contains a collection of cogs whose numbers of teeth enable researchers to speculate what they were meant to calculate. It seems the device may have had a rotating Moon set into its face, and by turning a dial you could see the phase and position for any day, as well as knowing when the next eclipse was due. Whoever made it had a phenomenal mind, but their identity will probably never be known. The machine may not be much to look at now, but as a monument to ancient ingenuity it surely rivals the Parthenon.