5 h 8 minAudiobook6 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if nature holds powers that turn a laboratory into a place of dread?
In Strange Forces, Leopoldo Lugones brings science, myth and the occult onto the same stage. A scientist pursues a hidden power in nature. In Yzur, a stubborn experimenter tries to teach a monkey to speak, convinced that apes choose silence to escape work. The search for knowledge becomes an encounter with something no one fully understands.
The Horses of Abdera turns an old Greek legend into a city's struggle with its own prized animals. The Rain of Fire retells the biblical destruction of Gomorrah as cosmic horror. After the tales, a closing essay presents Lugones's account of the universe's beginnings through a series of lessons, carrying the collection's questions from strange creatures to the cosmos.
What you’ll discover
- The silence of Yzur Meet a monkey whose silence draws a determined man into an unsettling experiment.
- A city faces fear Enter Abdera, where horses act together and leave citizens facing a danger they cannot explain.
- Fire from the sky Experience a biblical tale through the dread and wonder of cosmic horror.
- Science meets the occult Explore a world where scientific inquiry and hidden forces share the same ground.
- A vision of beginnings Follow the closing essay beyond the tales into Lugones's vision of the cosmos.
Who will love it
Readers who enjoy early science fiction, ghost stories and eerie experiments will feel at home here, along with anyone curious about Argentine fiction and tales where a bold idea meets real terror.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- An inventor finds that sound can become force
- A pleasure-loving city meets a rain of fire
- Haunted minds see what others cannot
- Music and thought are treated as measurable matter
- Old stories return with a sting
- Experiments on plants and apes cross a line
- A spirit's flood and a cosmic lecture
Who’s who
- The Omega inventorA poor tinkerer who earns his living from small gadgets and secretly masters a force that turns sound into destruction.
- The gourmet of GomorrahA gouty, comfort-loving bachelor who watches copper sparks fall on his city from a clear sky.
- The English homeopathA lonely former officer in a farming colony who cannot escape a shape he first saw after practicing yoga.
- JuanA clerk who loves music and builds an apparatus and a rebuilt piano to make the colors of music visible.
- Doctor PaulinA physicist and spiritualist in Buenos Aires who isolates a gas he believes to be thought itself.
- YzurA circus chimpanzee whose owner is sure that apes can be taught to speak again.
- SosistratusAn Armenian hermit who has spent decades in prayer above the Jordan and is tested by a visiting stranger.
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- Paperback
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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Forze strane
by Leopoldo Lugones · 1906
A pocket-sized box makes a flywheel roar, and only its inventor can aim it.
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In short
A pocket-sized box makes a flywheel of three hundred kilograms roar, and only its inventor can aim it. So opens Strange Forces, a set of tales by the Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
An inventor finds that sound can become force
The first tale, The Omega Force, follows a poor tinkerer who earns his living with cheap inventions. He believes the human mind and the forces of the cosmos are one, and that machines only get in the way. After his friends return from a long holiday, he tells them that he has found the mechanical power of sound, and he calls it the Omega Force.
He explains it with bells, tuning forks and the ratios of the lyre of Orpheus. His device is a disk like a watch, holding four tiny forks and a microphone horn. Aimed at a flywheel of three hundred kilograms, it sets the wheel spinning until the whole house shakes. Yet neither friend can make it work, because only the inventor can aim it, by a sense he cannot explain.
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What is Strange Forces about?
It is a collection of fantastic tales and one essay by Leopoldo Lugones. Inventors, doctors and dreamers chase hidden forces such as sound, thought and the cosmos, and find marvels that carry a heavy price.
What stories are in Strange Forces?
The book holds The Omega Force, The Fire Rain, An Unexplained Phenomenon, The Miracle of Saint Wilfrid, The Toad, Metamusic, The Origin of the Flood, The Horses of Abdera, Viola Acherontia, Yzur, The Statue of Salt, The Psychon and a closing essay on cosmogony.
Is Strange Forces science fiction or horror?
It is both.
The author
Leopoldo Lugones
1874–1938 · Argentine poet
Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) was an Argentine poet, short-story writer, and journalist. He was born in Villa de María del Río Seco, Córdoba, and later lived in Buenos Aires. He published the poetry collection Las montañas del oro in 1897 and the story collection Strange Forces in 1906. He died in Tigre.
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