Come, Steam Engine Time
Jack Womack
One summer morning in Lexington in 1964, when I was eight years old and waiting to see if third grade would be any worse than second (it wasn't), I turned on the TV to watch the local morning show. The hostess, a horsey type, resembled a spring bouquet threatened by a shiny egg case of hair. The host was a silvery sportscaster who wore too-short black socks and flashed a zombie Rockette's shins whenever he crossed his legs. That morning they talked not about Derby parties, the fluoride threat, or gelatin salads studded with marshmallows and orange slices, but rather a new paperback by Frank Edwards, Strange World.
Later that morning I asked my grandmother to buy me the copy of Strange World I found, as I knew I would, on the black metal rack at Rexall's drugstore. By sunset I'd read it through twice, poring over tales of the monster apes of Oregon, the Barbados coffins, poltergeists, glowing purple globs in a Philadelphia street and, as per the back blurb, "who -- or what -- painted 'Remember Pearl Harbor' on an Indiana sidewalk two years before the infamous attack?"
Sense of wonder, awake.
***
As the real 1960s have in the fifty years since been endlessly regooded before being sealed in plastic as The Sixties (™), many of the decade's B and C-list occurrences, fancies and actualities have been lost to memory. Among those was the widespread pre-hippie interest in the occult, the alternate sciences, and alternate consciousness as a whole. Like many paperbacks on those days, Strange World sold hundreds of thousands of copies upon release; and then it kept selling. Sales of other such titles rose fast enough that before long there were far fewer nurse novels and westerns on the shelves, their space permanently supplanted by an endless series of books on ESP, psychokinesis, dowsing, witchcraft for home or office, palmistry, the Bermuda Triangle, Edgar Cayce, mysterious disappearances, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot -- everything save phrenology, for which there was no resurrection.
Midway through the nationwide UFO flap in 1965-67 (the biggest since 1947, when Kenneth Arnold first saw the flying discs over Washington state) Edwards' Flying Saucers -- Serious Business appeared, in short time selling millions of copies in hardcover. Every publisher got in on the game. But there weren't enough black beauties to keep enough hacks writing overtime to satisfy the demand, and so the backlists were sacked. (Not unlike the coeval demand in those years for "Tolkienesque" fantasy, which until the first generation of rewriters honed their craft was sated only by reprints of Dunsany, Eddings, Robert E.Howard, Etidorpha, and, happenstance, Lovecraft). Soon the likes of Stranger Than Strange As It Seems were racked side-by-side with elderly-but-durable collections of oddities by Rupert T. Gould, F. DeWitt Miller, and the great Harold T.Wilkins; cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, noted Space Brothers George Adamski, Howard Menger, and Gray Barker.
One day in 1966 or so I saw a new one of these in Spencer Gifts' racks, and jumped -- masters of the old school were inevitably more entertaining than contemporary scribes, save for the last of the Greats, John "Mothman" Keel. Big shaky yellow letters against a purple background. LO!, the title. Published by Ace Books, always a good sign -- Paperback Library and Pyramid were the other specialists in this field. I paid far less attention to the front cover blurb ("To read Charles Fort is to ride on a comet" -- The New York Times) than I did to the question posed on this book's back cover:
"Can Science explain THE COW THAT GAVE BIRTH TO TWO LAMBS??"
After that, I could have cared less who wrote "Remember Pearl Harbor" on a sidewalk in 1939.
***
At home with the book, I lay on my bed and turned to the first page, expecting to read once again about The Man Who Walked Across A Field, or The Missing Lighthouse Keepers, or the 1897 airships. No.
A naked man in a city street -- the track of a horse in volcanic mud -- the mystery of reindeer's ears – a huge, black form, like a whale, in the sky, and it drips red drops as if attacked by celestial swordfishes – an appalling cherub appears in the sea --
Confusions.
Showers of frogs and blizzards of snails -- gushes of periwinkles down from the sky --
The preposterous, the grotesque, the incredible -- and why, if I am going to tell of hundreds of these, is the quite ordinary so regarded?
An unclothed man shocks a crowd -- a moment later, if nobody is generous with an overcoat, somebody is collecting handkerchiefs to knot around him.
A naked fact startles a meeting of a scientific society -- and whatever it has for loins is soon diapered with conventional explanations.
After a half hour or so I was so unsettled -- terrified -- by what I read I shoved the book into the back of my bottom dresser drawer, too scared to keep reading yet unwilling to throw it out. It was only after I'd read another ten or twelve successive UFO titles, seeing references to the writer in each that I was ready to try Lo! anew.
By the time I finished the book I was a Fortean.
***
Charles Fort (August 9, 1874 - May 3, 1932), was older than my grandparents by nearly a quarter century. Ace reissued each of his books of phenomena --The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo! Wild Talents -- and in the first reissue was an excerpt from a delirious intro written for the hardcover one-volume Books of Charles Fort (1941) by risque novelist Tiffany Thayer, who presented himself as Fort's best friend, no matter that far too often he was anything but.
Thayer tells us Fort had Nietzsche's mustache, wore thick glasses, made homebrew, liked "strong cheeses," had no telephone and but one male friend (his one-time editor and famed American author Theodore Dreiser); that he lived with Anna, his wife of many years, in the Bronx; that in their apartment hung framed specimens of stick insects and giant spiders, a photo of a baseball-sized hailstone, and a glass case holding angel's hair -- shredded metal fiber that fell, somehow, from the sky. First Fortean Fanboy Thayer's description of the preternaturally sedentary writer as one whose "frame called for leather and buckles, that the board should have been bare and brown, washed by slops from heavy tankards and worn by heavy sword-hands" is as restrained as all of Thayer's writing be it fictional, non-fictional, or intermediate (as it, and so much else, so often proves to be).
That was pretty much all I or anybody knew about Fort until the 1970 publication of Damon Knight's Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained, which information was considerably expanded upon by Jim Steinmeyer in his Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (2008). At this date we probably know as much as we will ever know of the details of Fort's life; the contents of his mind continue to surprise.
Many Parts, his unpublished memoir of his Albany, New York childhood is told in a deadpan simultaneously hilarious and brutal. The oldest of three sons, Charles took most of the punishment his upper-middle class father (called "They" by Fort) dished out. The elder Fort starts off as autocratic, slowly turns more authoritarian, can finally be described only as sociopathic Victorian. After the boys' beloved mother died he married a woman none liked, which helped not at all. Charles, fast with his words, received even more of the brunt: daily insults, beatings, slappings, whippings. When he was -- eight? ten? twelve? his father punched him in the nose, whereupon he ran upstairs to the parental bedroom, to wipe his blood all over the white, white sheets. All the boys were repeatedly locked in a pitch-black room to think upon their crimes for a few hours, or few days, or few weeks, fed once a day through a slot in the door. When Fort was sixteen his father and stepmother sent Clarence, the youngest son, to the 19th century equivalent of an unaccredited tough love camp. Soon after one night he stormed out of the house, shattering glass behind him, never returning.
A benevolent uncle helped him get a job at the Brooklyn World, where he soon became editor; and as soon took off to travel, going by continental rail, tramp steamer, banana boat: across the U.S., across to London, down to South Africa. While recovering from malaria in Cape Town, he was nursed back to health by a local woman, Anna Filing. He fell in love with her. As it happened, she first met him eight years earlier and fell in love with him at the time, never imagining they'd meet again.
Married, they came to New York City, and he tried to work as a writer in the burgeoning popular magazine market, specializing in humorous short stories set in gritty, family-friendly versions of the same slums in which they lived (Lower Manhattan, at the time, had the highest population density in the world.) In seven years he sold a few stories, making do with odd jobs; at least twice they had to chop up furniture for firewood. In 1905 he met Theodore Dreiser, one of the best-known magazine editors of the day, already notorious as the author of the much-banned novel Sister Carrie. They hit it off at once and Dreiser started buying Fort's stories.
Seeking background information to add to his stories, Fort went to the New York Public Library's brand-new main reference room in search of colorful anecdotes with which he could pepper his fiction. He started taking notes.We do not know the first time, or why, he decided to begin reading through runs of scientific journals, and jotting down that information. Even as he continued writing stories for Dreiser, he accumulated his first 40,000 notes.
In 1909 Fort sold and published his only novel, The Outcast Manufacturers, about which Dreiser noted regretfully that "the art of luring your readers on" was missing. Set mostly in a tenement in Hell's Kitchen, the story tells of the Birtwhistles, their neighbors, and their mail-order scheme, the Universal Manufacturing Company. For the first two-thirds of the book Fort's magic with language nearly conceals the fact that absolutely nothing happens. At that point the very talkative characters are all evicted and tossed onto the street (which may in fact have happened to the Forts in life) -- yet here no great tragedy results, nor much of anything else. Yet throughout the book and most notably at the start of chapter sixteen, the auctorial voice as it will become, as it is, suddenly emerges.
Paddy's Market looks like a torchlight parade going up one side of the avenue and down the other side -- a night parade of flagellants shrieking with self-inflicted torture. Then, heard in the market itself, confused lamentation disintegrates into distinct and mercantile cries -- flagellants scourging themselves only with their arms, beating their breasts only to keep warm -- to rid themselves not of sin, but of cauliflowers and beets.
At age forty-two he inherited enough money from his uncle that he and Anna could live in reasonable comfort for the rest of their lives. Fort, still gathering data at the library, began writing novels. These are assumed to be the Lost Fortean Ur-texts, X and Y. As their only readers were Dreiser, who sent them off, and the editors who repeatedly rejected them, we will no more know that than we will know the sound of Buddy Bolden. Then, Fort sent Dreiser the manuscript of a new book. Dreiser read it and immediately took it to his own publisher Horace Liveright, claiming later to have demanded that they would either publish the book, or he would take his books and move to a different publisher.
The Book of the Damned soon went on the Boni & Liveright schedule.
***
A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
In the wake of the Great War came the end of the Spanish Flu, came Dada, came the confirmation of the theory of Relativity, came The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, came Charles Fort; some of the many different expressions of 1919.
The New York Times, as earlier noted, gave it an ideal blurb (although the full review makes one wonder about the reviewer's intent); Booth Tarkington, author of The Magnificent Ambersons, fell for it as did Dreiser (as well as soon-to-be famous screenwriter Ben Hecht). While we are not sure how much of the book either read, H.G.Wells claimed it to be almost comically beneath his attention, and H.L. Mencken thought it nothing but the work of another imbecile American crank.
Cranks write books such as Cancer: Is the Dog the Cause? or We Never Went to the Moon, or The Human Gyroscope.
This is Charles Fort, nearly a century ago, tossing off one of those notions of his to be later re-expressed by others, years later, in other shape and media:
I think we're property.
I should say we belong to something:
That once upon a time, this earth was No-Man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:
That something owns this earth -- all others warned off.
For but a single contemporary iteration of this proposal, see The X-Files.
The first chapter, or Overture of The Book of The Damned explains that by "the excluded," Fort means The Data. The Data are the foundation of the structure. The Data are concrete examples of phenomena neither explainable by science nor occurring in accordance with scientific laws, said phenomena being accordingly ignored or denied by science.
It remains unclear to what degree Fort himself selected facts to fit his own theories, knowingly or unknowingly, but bear in mind that isn't the point. "You don't read the Bible for literature," said Auden, and you don't read Charles Fort for science. One reads his proposal re: the Super-Sargasso Sea, which hangs in the sky above and around the earth, a place from which things fall (which tale has a charming DC Silver Age ring to it); or his idea that space is in fact something like a rich space jelly but a short distance away -- perhaps, he adds, always leaving open other possibilities. The most notable possibility being that he was in his own way playing the dozens with scientists, for the hell of it.
Fort played Loki to Science's Wotan, disliking and distrusting scientists as much as he did his father. Two reasons he expressed are that science refused to admit that there are no natural in-between states (at least, in those pre-Schrodinger days); but even more so, that scientists considered their opinions infallible as Papal edicts. Further, and more obnoxiously, they would ignore contradictory evidence. So Fort, in response, lays out the Data, taken from the individual notes he had been gathered over so many years. Starting off by describing a series of ever-more colorful rainfalls -- yellow, black, green, red -- Fort proceeds, to such phenomena as pink snow, snowflakes a foot across, falls of icicles and lumps of ice, rains of fishes, rains of fresh meat, rains of frogs, unlikely objects dug out of Native American burial mounds, cigar-shaped bodies seen crossing the sun, animals feeling earthquakes before they occurred; odd lights in the sea or in the sky -- nearly all with cited references.
As the steady accretion of data drifts ever higher Fort relates his evolving thoughts on the one theory he appears to have taken more seriously than his others -- certainly he continued to develop it. He proposes, here, that all things exist in an Intermediate state: "quasi-existence, neither real nor unreal." Steinmeyer deftly sums up Intermediatism as the belief that everything is in fact "part of a hyphenated existence, between positive-negative, or animal-vegetable, or even yellow-red." Most notably of all, between reality and unreality -- that one should be so perpetually distinguishable from the other cannot be assumed a given. Fort himself is exemplary, being at once crank and genius, solemn and hilarious, modernist and postmodernist; one of the first writers of the century to recognize what we now call cognitive dissonance. And, for one so driven to focus upon science, when he turns his attention to other aspects of the Data he makes some of his most unsettling observations.
There have been suggestions of an occult control upon the minds of the inhabitants of this earth. Let anybody who does not like the idea that his mind may be most subtly controlled, without his knowledge of it, think back to what propagandists did with his beliefs in the years 1914-1918. Also, he need not think so far back as that.
Nor, do we.
***
The Book of the Damned sold well enough, going into a second printing. One day Fort went to the Library's Reference Room, where he spent so many years doing research, and asked to see a copy. The librarian noted it was filed under "Literature, Crank." The librarian assured him it could not be considered otherwise. "Forces are moving me," he wrote Dreiser, explaining that he'd burned the tens of thousands of his notes and forever taken leave of the institution. In late 1920 he and Anna moved to London, where almost immediately he headed for the Main Reference Room of the British Library to begin taking a new series of notes. Their life in London was no more exciting than it was in New York; in the evenings he and Anna had quiet dinners, or went to the movies. He wrote his second book, New Lands, which Boni & Liveright published in 1923. Focusing to a large degree on the theories and foibles of astronomers, filled with so many cited references as The Book of The Damned, the mounting of the data combined with the near-uniformity of the subject matter makes this the most challenging of Fort's books when read more than once. Yet between star and telescope his style continues to strengthen, and ideas continue to tumble forth, to be taken up again later on.
Lost tribes and the nations that have disappeared from the face of this earth -- that the skies have reeked with terrestrial civilizations, spreading out in celestial stagnations, where their remains to this day may be. The Mayans -- and what became of them? Bones of the Mayans, picked white as frost by space-scavengers, regioned to this day in a sterile luxuriousness somewhere, spread upon existence like the pseudo-breath of Death, crystalized on a sky-plane.
In their flat in Marchmont Street Fort had many thousands of new notes, which he stored in a pigeonholed cabinet, filed in accordance with his own systems. Along with his continuing trips to the library he began corresponding with readers and nascent Forteans who wished to pass along their appreciation and, more importantly, clippings about or even records of their own researches into local phenomena. Although science fiction writers of the thirties and later tended to view Fort as Fort may have viewed the average astronomer, among his early correspondents were later SF writers Miriam Allen DeFord, Maynard Shipley, Edmond Hamilton, and Eric Frank Russell. Tiffany Thayer wrote, as well, and so began that exchange. Dreiser visited the Forts shortly after the publication of An American Tragedy. He was deeply saddened when Fort told him he'd burned both X and Y along with the 40,000 notes when he left New York.
***
Fort finished his next book in 1924. Called, initially, Skyward Ho! it remained in typescript for many years. Boni & Liveright turned it down, sales of New Lands being (understandably) much lower than those of his first book. He and Anna moved back to New York in 1928, finding a place on West 124th Street. He returned to the Main Reference Room and began anew to take notes, although by now his eyesight was so worsening that it was harder and at last impossible to do research or even read, every day. Much of his time he spent creating and developing a game he called Super-checkers, which involved a large cloth gingham sheet and many, many thumbtacks pierced through with cardboard to serve as pieces ("slightly less than 400 pieces on a game surface of 800 squares" notes Steinmeyer). One of the few photos of Fort shows him contentedly sitting alongside the sheet. But by the next year his eyesight had so worsened that he found himself no longer able to devote such attention to the original sources, and so his visits decreased. Though he took fewer notes, he continued to write.
The Forts moved to Ryer Avenue, off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx (still standing) and there Tiffany Thayer appeared in person for a visit in 1930, soon after his first own bestselling novel was published. They talked. Fort told him of his manuscript Skyward Ho! Like Dreiser, Thayer didn't hesitate, taking the manuscript to his publisher, Claude Kendall, and convinced him to bring it out. As no one was keen about the title, Thayer and Fort batted about several possibilities before the former made the winning suggestion.
Without telling the honoree, Thayer founded the Fortean Society, intending to publicize both the book and Fort in general. The first meeting of the Society took place toward the end of January 1931. In attendance were Thayer, Dreiser, Alexander Woolcott, Ben Hecht, Dunninger the magician; neither Tarkington nor UK novelist John Cowper Powys could attend but sent messages. Fort was pretty much hoodwinked into attending but evidently took it well, sitting quietly in a chair smoking a cigar while Dreiser did most of the talking, and looking at the first copies he'd seen of Lo!
***
Wigwams on an island -- sparks in their columns of smoke.
Centuries later -- the uncertain columns are towers. What once were fluttering sparks are
the motionless lights of windows. According to critics of Tammany Hall, there has been monstrous corruption on this island: nevertheless, in the midst of it, this regularization has occurred. A woodland sprawl has sprung to stony attention.
Lo! Fort's greatest work, is the one the inexperienced Fortean should read first. His mastery of the Data is complete, and with a voice as distinct as any in American literature, he presents the data and his theories about the data with unexcelled beauty and precision, it is a work both personal and cosmic. Here he streamlines the theory of Intermediateness, speaking now not only of what he calls the oneness "in all confusions" but how reality-unreality forever iterates in ways perpetually expected-unexpected. He now brings to the entirety of the work what seems to be a much deeper understanding, and appreciation, and acceptance of the world.
Wise men have tried other ways. They have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.
Among the data contained in his third book is naturally, much regarding rains of the unexpected -- fish, snakes, winkles tossed across country lanes by "a disgruntled fishmonger"; astronomical phenomena, odd weather and the like -- but as well a far broader range of material: accounts of odd animals seen at sea or on land, mysterious attacks by what appear to have been animals, mysterious appearances of things and people, a multichapter account of the phenomena -- spontaneous combustion, lights in the sky, poltergeists, unseen. murderous wild animals, mysterious disappearances, manifestations of psychotic mania, speaking in tongues and so forth -- taking place during the Wales Revival of 1904-05. And, of course, the cow that gave birth to two lambs -- or, rather, wool-covered calves. As William Gibson created the word "cyberspace" so Fort observes here that a possible way in which frogs and the like may fall to earth absent of windstorms would be "a transportory force which I shall call teleportation." And, he continued to toss off notions that would later in the century settle in the minds of readers to come, carrying them to far different places than probably even Fort foresaw.
Unknown, luminous things, or beings, have often been seen, sometimes close to this earth and sometimes high in the sky. It may be that some of them were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else in our existence, but that others were lights on the vessels of explorers, or voyagers, from somewhere else.
***
By late 1931, Fort, growing progressively blinder, finished the manuscript of a new book, Wild Talents, his most personal book in many ways; the phenomena here pertain almost exclusively to the individual's specific reactions vis-a-vis the Fortean. He uses some of his most straightforward language to offer some of his most provocative ideas. As you read the book it can almost seem that the more he studied the actions of people at large -- whether they be disappearing mysteriously, bursting into flame, having stones thrown at them by unseen agencies, being stabbed by unseen assailants, possibly turning into other animals -- the less he was troubled by the behavior of astronomers. In Wild Talents Fort's humor pours forth, most unforgettable as he describes in chapter five the steps he takes in approaching The Data, beginning:
"Good morning!" said the dog. He disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.
I have this record, upon newspaper authority.
It can't be said -- and therefore will be said -- that I have a marvelous credulity for newspaper yarns.
But I am so obviously offering everything in this book, as fiction. That is, if there is fiction.
And ending:
I draw my line at the dog who said "Good morning!" and disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor. He is a symbol of the false and arbitrary and unreasonable and inconsistent -- though of course also the reasonable and consistent -- limit, which everybody must somewhere set, in order to pretend to be.
You can't fool me with that dog-story.
Among the delights to be found in these pages is his account of having one day stared at a picture in his apartment and (seemingly) causing it to fall from the wall, and his proffering of the eternal question "Was somebody collecting Ambroses?" And, in his most perfect expression of the underlying oneness of all things, a metaphor by the end of the last century had pretty much become received wisdom:
Not a bottle of catsup can fall from a tenement-house fire-escape, in Harlem, without being noted -- not only by the indignant people downstairs, but--even though infinitesimally -- universally -- maybe--
Affecting the price of pajamas, in Jersey City; the temper of somebody's mother-in-law, in Greenland; the demand, in China, for rhinoceros horn for the cure of rheumatism -- maybe --
And, although by this point he was already being seen with a certain suspicion by more of its practitioners (for example run down, if interested, the musings of First Fan Sam Moskowitz, who believed Fort to be a less rabid version of Richard Shaver), Fort courteously tosses down one last useful concept to science fiction literature and film before riding off on his comet:
Girls at the front--and they are discussing their usual not very profound subjects. The alarm--the enemy is advancing.
Command to the poltergeist girls to concentrate--and under their chairs they stick their wads of chewing gum.
A regiment bursts into flames, and the soldiers are torches. Horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails.
Reinforcements are smashed under cliffs that are teleported from the Rocky Mountains. The snatch of Niagara Falls--it pours upon the battlefield.
The little poltergeist girls reach for their wads of chewing gum.
***
Fort's final note reads: "Difficulty shaving. Gaunt places in face." It is thought now that he suffered from undiagnosed leukemia. On May 3 1932, he was taken to the hospital. Thayer brought him the first copy of Wild Talents, hot off the press. He died, a few hours later.
Some time after that Dreiser came to the apartment to see Anna, asking if Charles had been in touch. There'd been raps, and noises: one day, she said, his aunt came and told her she'd get none of his money, and she went to bed crying. In the middle of the night woke up, and saw him sitting there. "He said, 'Hello, Momma' and I was never so glad to see anybody in my whole life.'" She survived him by five years.
Dreiser and Thayer met to discuss what should happen to Fort's notes, to his manuscripts, to the preservation of his memory. To no one's surprise they wildly disagreed, Thayer forever alienating the better-known author, who refused to have anything more to do with matters Fortean. It wasn't long before Thayer was publishing the first issues of his zine, Doubt, nominally undertaken in order to print the remainder of the notes. But no sooner did the second World War begin than Thayer, an isolationist, conspiracy theorist, and crank of the third order, started using the pages to publish his musings on Pearl Harbor, on the draft, on the income tax, so on, so forth; to presenting theories so incomprehensible as to make Lawson's "Zig-Zag-And-Swirl" theory seem to be quantum mechanics, works posing a Hebraic origin for Native Americans, and so on -- after a while, naturally, there was no more room to reprint Fort's notes. By the time the last issue appeared in the late 1950s, around the same time the hardcover Books of Charles Fort went out of print, Thayer had managed to drive away most everyone.
***
A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time.
Thinking Fort to be an earlier iteration of Thayer, Martin Gardner -- noted science writer and a skeptic honorable enough to be called Fortean -- devoted a chapter to him in his Fads And Follies In the Name of Science. While Gardner could not help but note some of Fort's more outlandish theories, he quickly observes that we cannot be sure at all that Fort is serious. By the end of the chapter the reader realizes that, somehow, the subject caught him off-guard, and so he pays Fort far more respect than anyone else in the book deserves.
References to Fort began to appear in the flying saucer books that came out in the 1950s; more still in the UFO books that came out in the 1960s. Then, the books themselves, reappeared, and after that the start-up of new Fortean groups as his influence became clear in every aspect of what began to known as the Paranormal. And in the time since, the first appearance of Fortean Times in the UK, which quickly became and remains the journal for all Forteans -- which means, as far as I want to define it, one with a mind skeptical yet convincible, especially in matters most often considered "human -- all too human." In the past fifty years, but most especially since the turn of the century, ours has become a world where it is essential to be a Fortean. To what degree it is essential, we are I think only beginning to discover.
Fort's time is here.
As a Fortean, it pleases me greatly that the original will now be available in eBook form, having spent the good part of the past century in print. In words at times as beautiful as anything ever written in English, Charles Fort will reveal to you the marvels of an age, question the nature of what you have been taught, and -- most importantly -- provide you more with than one lead on how not to be fooled by the dog stories, no matter who does the tell. You to draw the line somewhere.