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Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers
How a writer who investigated scientific anomalies inspired a factious movement and made a lasting impact on American culture.
Flying saucers. Bigfoot. Frogs raining from the sky. Such phenomena fascinated Charles Fort, the maverick writer who scanned newspapers, journals, and magazines for reports of bizarre dogs that talked, vampires, strange visions in the sky, and paranormal activity. His books of anomalies advanced a philosophy that saw science as a small part of a larger system in which truth and falsehood continually transformed into one another. His work found a ragged following of skeptics who questioned not only science but the press, medicine, and politics. Though their worldviews varied, they shared compelling questions about genius, reality, and authority. At the center of this community was ad man, writer, and enfant terrible Tiffany Thayer, who founded the Fortean Society and ran it for almost three decades, collecting and reporting on every manner of oddity and conspiracy.
In Think to New Worlds , Joshua Blu Buhs argues that the Fortean effect on modern culture is deeper than you think. Fort’s descendants provided tools to expand the imagination, explore the social order, and demonstrate how power was exercised. Science fiction writers put these ideas to work as they sought to uncover the hidden structures undergirding reality. Avant-garde modernists—including the authors William Gaddis, Henry Miller, and Ezra Pound, as well as Surrealist visual artists—were inspired by Fort’s writing about metaphysical and historical forces. And in the years following World War II, flying saucer enthusiasts convinced of alien life raised questions about who controlled the universe.
Buhs’s meticulous and entertaining book takes a respectful look at a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, plucking them from history’s margins and spotlighting their mark on American modernism. Think to New Worlds is a timely consideration of a group united not only by conspiracies and mistrust of science but by their place in an ever-expanding universe rich with unexplained occurrences and visionary possibilities.
Flying saucers. Bigfoot. Frogs raining from the sky. Such phenomena fascinated Charles Fort, the maverick writer who scanned newspapers, journals, and magazines for reports of bizarre dogs that talked, vampires, strange visions in the sky, and paranormal activity. His books of anomalies advanced a philosophy that saw science as a small part of a larger system in which truth and falsehood continually transformed into one another. His work found a ragged following of skeptics who questioned not only science but the press, medicine, and politics. Though their worldviews varied, they shared compelling questions about genius, reality, and authority. At the center of this community was ad man, writer, and enfant terrible Tiffany Thayer, who founded the Fortean Society and ran it for almost three decades, collecting and reporting on every manner of oddity and conspiracy.
In Think to New Worlds , Joshua Blu Buhs argues that the Fortean effect on modern culture is deeper than you think. Fort’s descendants provided tools to expand the imagination, explore the social order, and demonstrate how power was exercised. Science fiction writers put these ideas to work as they sought to uncover the hidden structures undergirding reality. Avant-garde modernists—including the authors William Gaddis, Henry Miller, and Ezra Pound, as well as Surrealist visual artists—were inspired by Fort’s writing about metaphysical and historical forces. And in the years following World War II, flying saucer enthusiasts convinced of alien life raised questions about who controlled the universe.
Buhs’s meticulous and entertaining book takes a respectful look at a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, plucking them from history’s margins and spotlighting their mark on American modernism. Think to New Worlds is a timely consideration of a group united not only by conspiracies and mistrust of science but by their place in an ever-expanding universe rich with unexplained occurrences and visionary possibilities.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
384 pages, Hardcover
Published July 3, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 26, 2024
This book is about the legacy of Charles Fort. Fort himself is hard to describe. Imagine someone who actually was who Joe Rogan thinks that he his, except that Dana White is Theodore Dreiser.
Fort was something of a writer's writer, and while his lit-fic was unpublished or destroyed (by Fort) he grew famous on the basis of his quasi-journalistic compilations of weird, unexplained, and anomalous events in the world, and his books include some Menocchio-grade cosmology of nonsense. What Fort believed about what Fort wrote requires its own post to disentangle; his successors in the Fortean Society were less critical.
The book focuses on three areas: science fiction, art, and UFOs. The sections document many individuals who are more famous for other reasons and who were affiliated in one way or another. Many times this is a sort of direct interaction. Other times, it is a matter of similarity of thought or imagery.
The text is sumptuously cited, but this leans towards logical fallacy at points. Fort was an artsy weirdo, and associated with other artsy weirdos. Many of those artsy weirdos employed ideas that would fit within Fort's work. But it does not follow that any Fortean theme in a contemporary artsy weirdo is influenced by Fort, as opposed to a sort of mutuality of the zeitgeist. It is useless to try and distinguish between what is or what is not, but the text always assumes that it is.
On the other, other hand, it is like Blavatsky and Theosophy (of which there is overlap with Forteans) and once you see it, you will never unsee it. So I like the big picture, even if I question some of the specifics.
There are two specific things that hold this book back. The first is this is scholarly rather than popular. There is a chapter dedicated to Fort, and another to what happened to the Fortean Society afterwards, but this is a lousy introduction to Fort and the Forteans. Or at least it is not a proper history of the society, and the book is not arranged chronologically but thematically.
The second are the vignettes that are scattered in throughout the book. I think that the intention was to give asides to interesting side and supplemental material in something more of a Fortean style. But whatever the purpose was, it does not work. They disrupt the text and are often hard to follow within their own context, and feel more like the struggle between an author and editor.
The book concludes with the absorption of Fortean ideas into a more contemporary New Age and Occult oriented society, which the author cleverly ties up with how Post-Modernism parasitized the Modernism of the Forteans. And this is when where we live now comes up, and the news cycle dominated by conspiracy theory on paranoid obsession, straight from a Fortean playbook. The author acknowledges the parallels between the Fortean approach and that of, say, 200 Mules, but closes the matter with the acknowledgement. I am not so sure.
Throughout the book, the author does not flinch from how frequently the Foretans dabbled in fascism and racism. Like the Forteans seem to be the Ur-example of a group of people who go from an earnest desire to question the status quo and learn about the world and end up hating science and allying with '38 Nazis. This sociological function does not need to be in the scope of the book, but maybe it ought to be?
My thanks to the author, Joshua Blu Buhs, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for making the ARC available to me.
Fort was something of a writer's writer, and while his lit-fic was unpublished or destroyed (by Fort) he grew famous on the basis of his quasi-journalistic compilations of weird, unexplained, and anomalous events in the world, and his books include some Menocchio-grade cosmology of nonsense. What Fort believed about what Fort wrote requires its own post to disentangle; his successors in the Fortean Society were less critical.
The book focuses on three areas: science fiction, art, and UFOs. The sections document many individuals who are more famous for other reasons and who were affiliated in one way or another. Many times this is a sort of direct interaction. Other times, it is a matter of similarity of thought or imagery.
The text is sumptuously cited, but this leans towards logical fallacy at points. Fort was an artsy weirdo, and associated with other artsy weirdos. Many of those artsy weirdos employed ideas that would fit within Fort's work. But it does not follow that any Fortean theme in a contemporary artsy weirdo is influenced by Fort, as opposed to a sort of mutuality of the zeitgeist. It is useless to try and distinguish between what is or what is not, but the text always assumes that it is.
On the other, other hand, it is like Blavatsky and Theosophy (of which there is overlap with Forteans) and once you see it, you will never unsee it. So I like the big picture, even if I question some of the specifics.
There are two specific things that hold this book back. The first is this is scholarly rather than popular. There is a chapter dedicated to Fort, and another to what happened to the Fortean Society afterwards, but this is a lousy introduction to Fort and the Forteans. Or at least it is not a proper history of the society, and the book is not arranged chronologically but thematically.
The second are the vignettes that are scattered in throughout the book. I think that the intention was to give asides to interesting side and supplemental material in something more of a Fortean style. But whatever the purpose was, it does not work. They disrupt the text and are often hard to follow within their own context, and feel more like the struggle between an author and editor.
The book concludes with the absorption of Fortean ideas into a more contemporary New Age and Occult oriented society, which the author cleverly ties up with how Post-Modernism parasitized the Modernism of the Forteans. And this is when where we live now comes up, and the news cycle dominated by conspiracy theory on paranoid obsession, straight from a Fortean playbook. The author acknowledges the parallels between the Fortean approach and that of, say, 200 Mules, but closes the matter with the acknowledgement. I am not so sure.
Throughout the book, the author does not flinch from how frequently the Foretans dabbled in fascism and racism. Like the Forteans seem to be the Ur-example of a group of people who go from an earnest desire to question the status quo and learn about the world and end up hating science and allying with '38 Nazis. This sociological function does not need to be in the scope of the book, but maybe it ought to be?
My thanks to the author, Joshua Blu Buhs, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago Press, for making the ARC available to me.
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September 17, 2024Joshua Blu Buhs’ ‘cultural history’ of the Forteans faces similar problems. Charles Fort was a Brooklyn autodidact who used newspaper clippings to make anthologies of such paranormal ‘anomalies’ as showers of fish falling from the skies or spontaneous combustion. In the interwar years his books enjoyed a mild vogue with surrealists, who admired their collage technique, which Buhs’ jerky prose emulates, and science fiction writers, who quarried them for plots. Although Fort died in 1932, long before Arnold’s saucers appeared, he primed Americans to accept them. His gnomic claim that ‘we are fished for’ presented people as the prey of powerful visitors from beyond. Fort’s denial that the natural sciences could explain everything was a radical form of Protestant freethinking. It fostered a scepticism about scepticism that insulated fantasists of all kinds from ‘debunkers’.
The book’s real subject is Tiffany Thayer, who turned Fort’s pawky scepticism into a system. Thayer was a smutty novelist and copywriter with grand pretensions: one of his unfinished projects was a sex mad, multivolume biography of the Mona Lisa. He became Fort’s apostle: editing his works and founding a Fortean Society whose journal became a clearing house for cranks. Thayer’s widow later destroyed its records, but Buhs uses correspondence to reconstruct his nasty mind. Doubt – the journal’s title from 1944 onwards – printed tall stories, everything from eels wriggling out of taps to ships vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle, and ranted against modern medicine, condemning the fluoridation of water and attacking tonsillectomies for causing polio. Yet Thayer’s abiding obsession was with lies in high places. He dismissed Pearl Harbor, the invention of atomic weapons and the Sputnik launch as hoaxes to justify military spending.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion. He is currently writing a book about Edwardians and gods.
The book’s real subject is Tiffany Thayer, who turned Fort’s pawky scepticism into a system. Thayer was a smutty novelist and copywriter with grand pretensions: one of his unfinished projects was a sex mad, multivolume biography of the Mona Lisa. He became Fort’s apostle: editing his works and founding a Fortean Society whose journal became a clearing house for cranks. Thayer’s widow later destroyed its records, but Buhs uses correspondence to reconstruct his nasty mind. Doubt – the journal’s title from 1944 onwards – printed tall stories, everything from eels wriggling out of taps to ships vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle, and ranted against modern medicine, condemning the fluoridation of water and attacking tonsillectomies for causing polio. Yet Thayer’s abiding obsession was with lies in high places. He dismissed Pearl Harbor, the invention of atomic weapons and the Sputnik launch as hoaxes to justify military spending.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion. He is currently writing a book about Edwardians and gods.
November 19, 2024
Conspiracism has changed since The Book of the Damned. Fort's playfulness has been replaced by acerbic nihilism, which became omnipresent and decoupled from any need to compile evidence or craft arguments.
He was getting Perpetual Peace, though at the price of widespread imbecility. He was willing to pay the cost as long as it's the other fellow's brain they wash and not my own.
Russell confided his sadness to John W. Campbell, who intellectualized the problem, turned to science fiction for answers. Maybe Heinlein could explain Russell's unexpected flood of emotions: 'The trouble is the lack of People.' Heinlein had suspected, according to Campbell, that 'most of the 'people' in the world weren't real - just some sort of automatons put in the scene to fill in the background for the real people.' Campbell thought he was right. Thayer (like Russell, like Campbell himself) was real person. Russell's depression, Campbell diagnosed, was 'the usual reaction of one of the People that another of the all-too-rare People had left the world. The deep and heavy feeling of 'Who, now, is left to carry one ... ?' The answer is, of course, that when one of the People dies, there never is anyone to carry on; the thing that makes the People, People, is simply that they're unique individuals, and being unique, have no exact replacement.'
He was getting Perpetual Peace, though at the price of widespread imbecility. He was willing to pay the cost as long as it's the other fellow's brain they wash and not my own.
Russell confided his sadness to John W. Campbell, who intellectualized the problem, turned to science fiction for answers. Maybe Heinlein could explain Russell's unexpected flood of emotions: 'The trouble is the lack of People.' Heinlein had suspected, according to Campbell, that 'most of the 'people' in the world weren't real - just some sort of automatons put in the scene to fill in the background for the real people.' Campbell thought he was right. Thayer (like Russell, like Campbell himself) was real person. Russell's depression, Campbell diagnosed, was 'the usual reaction of one of the People that another of the all-too-rare People had left the world. The deep and heavy feeling of 'Who, now, is left to carry one ... ?' The answer is, of course, that when one of the People dies, there never is anyone to carry on; the thing that makes the People, People, is simply that they're unique individuals, and being unique, have no exact replacement.'
November 12, 2024
This was an exceptionally well-researched book. It exposed Charles Fort's legacy layer by layer, over the decades and cultural and historical contexts. The voices and antagonists and outright personal animosity were well told. And many were exposed from use of the archives of their letters and works. Throughout the narrative, the essence or Charles Fort and his Fortean views was always contrasted against the supposed purveyors of his work, so you always got the 'who, slanting the what, for whose purpose.'
The book broke the history into 4 sections, by examining four groups that over the years comprised the Fortean world of adherents, e.g. the Fortean Society itself and its personalities, the science fictioneers, avante-garde artists, and finally the UFOlogists. This structure worked well.
The mid part of the book did bog down, was dense in some ways. However, overall the detail, insights and stories really illuminated the various "movements" that sprang from Fortean ideas. It covers every major figure in the Fortean panoply from Thayer, Henry Miller, Ezra Pound, Blish, Russell, and so many more. I was astonished at how many poets, writers, and artists were involved in some way. When the Fort followers got into economic and social radicalism, it entered dangerous territory with autocratic social theories and fascism. And many were eschewed for that.
Fortean publications and members eventually turned to its roots only to have UFOs upend it. Along the way, the earth saw every possible explanation for every possible unexplainable phenomena.. some propagated by sheer opinion and fantasy, others spawned by disdain of scientific certainty. Either way, Fort's legacy survives.
The book's aim may be to show how the Fortean effect on modern culture is far far deeper and extensive than anyone thinks. I for one believe Joshua Blu Buhs has made a very historical case for the Fort-inspired ideas running through the 21st century culture we see, hear and read today. We'll done!
This book also has incredible scholarship. It has 386 pages, and 292 are the text. The 'Notes' for each chapter are a total of 77 pages and the sources are very varied and fascinating reading in and of themselves. As a retired librarian and archivist, I found the 'Notes' exceptional piece of bibliography. Followed by a great index. The book also includes illustrations and reprints of photographs.
I enjoyed this book and would say if you enjoy literary history, the paranormal, UFOs or avante-garde you will find something here to enjoy and new ideas and details about it that you did not know. Skip the areas you are not interested in, don't miss this very deep examination of the core influences that permeate your esoteric interests. Let Fort and his followers share their origins with you, and perhaps help you know yourself better through their voices.
The book broke the history into 4 sections, by examining four groups that over the years comprised the Fortean world of adherents, e.g. the Fortean Society itself and its personalities, the science fictioneers, avante-garde artists, and finally the UFOlogists. This structure worked well.
The mid part of the book did bog down, was dense in some ways. However, overall the detail, insights and stories really illuminated the various "movements" that sprang from Fortean ideas. It covers every major figure in the Fortean panoply from Thayer, Henry Miller, Ezra Pound, Blish, Russell, and so many more. I was astonished at how many poets, writers, and artists were involved in some way. When the Fort followers got into economic and social radicalism, it entered dangerous territory with autocratic social theories and fascism. And many were eschewed for that.
Fortean publications and members eventually turned to its roots only to have UFOs upend it. Along the way, the earth saw every possible explanation for every possible unexplainable phenomena.. some propagated by sheer opinion and fantasy, others spawned by disdain of scientific certainty. Either way, Fort's legacy survives.
The book's aim may be to show how the Fortean effect on modern culture is far far deeper and extensive than anyone thinks. I for one believe Joshua Blu Buhs has made a very historical case for the Fort-inspired ideas running through the 21st century culture we see, hear and read today. We'll done!
This book also has incredible scholarship. It has 386 pages, and 292 are the text. The 'Notes' for each chapter are a total of 77 pages and the sources are very varied and fascinating reading in and of themselves. As a retired librarian and archivist, I found the 'Notes' exceptional piece of bibliography. Followed by a great index. The book also includes illustrations and reprints of photographs.
I enjoyed this book and would say if you enjoy literary history, the paranormal, UFOs or avante-garde you will find something here to enjoy and new ideas and details about it that you did not know. Skip the areas you are not interested in, don't miss this very deep examination of the core influences that permeate your esoteric interests. Let Fort and his followers share their origins with you, and perhaps help you know yourself better through their voices.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews