A Fortean Emergence: The Early SF/Forteana Relationship

A sample chapter from my book, The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction, covering the life and work of anomalist Charles Hoy Fort and the literature that spun off his writings

From The Fortean Influence on Science Fiction: Charles Fort and the Evolution of the Genre © 2021 Tanner F. Boyle by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com. (Available here.)

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Back in the 1920s, Charles Fort, the first writer to explore inexplicable events, observed you can measure a circle by beginning anywhere. Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent that separating and studying a single element is not only a waste of time but also will automatically lead to the development of belief. Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it.

—John A. Keel¹

The oeuvre of H.G. Wells is groundbreaking literature in the realm of SF. One of these works was his 1895 book The Time Machine, which is largely considered the first book to feature a time-traveling device. It also popularized the concept of time travel as a staple of numerous SF narratives. As is the case with most of H.G. Wells’ writings, The Time Machine sees a narrative heavily interested in evolution and biological science. The Time Traveller in the book hypothesizes about the nature of the dismal future he finds himself in:

The people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship.²

The advancement of time in the novel is always focused on evolutionary changes. When The Time Traveller goes into the even further distant future, he encounters a devolution of sorts: As the world moves towards its end and the sun expires, he comes across crablike beings as if from the earliest stages of evolution, when creatures first started moving out of the ocean.³ The Time Machine is not alone in its interest in evolutionary theory as it is explored in the works of H.G. Wells. With 1897’s The War of the Worlds, readers see a race of Martians killed off by diseases which humans have become immune to:

These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle.⁴

As revolutionary as the works of Wells may be (and SF is greatly indebted to him), something is lacking in his fantastic visions. The scientific determinism which defined his era pervades his work, rendering the fantastic inevitable or somewhat cold and sterile. Perhaps this is because Wells, an intellectual opposite of Charles Fort, found himself defending science above all else, possibly motivated by his college biology teacher, the highly influential Thomas Henry Huxley. Despite his less than spectacular scientific qualifications, however, “Wells had acquired a clear vision both of the past and the future that would never leave him and which had a profound impact on his thought. That vision was founded by T.H. Huxley’s teaching of the evolutionary process.”⁵ Huxley was known as Darwin’s Bulldog, taught by the evolutionary science founder himself, and was a staunch advocate for evolution in a time when religion and science seemed to be at war. The Scopes Monkey Trial was a few decades away, but this head-to-head matchup of two juggernaut ideologies represents well the kind of war Huxley and Wells seemed to be fighting. Huxley promoted a sort of cosmic pessimism which is underlined in Peter J. Bowler’s Evolution: The History of an Idea. The author, quoting Bertrand Russell, gives a salient picture of the cultural climate of the era:

(T.H.) Huxley’s scientific naturalism was repudiated by the new generation of analytical philosophers, but his cosmic pessimism seemed to resonate with the mood of the time. […] Bertrand Russell summed up the image of humanity’s place in the world thus: “[…] all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of the universe in ruins.”⁶

Wells mirrors this indifference and pessimism in The Time Machine: “(The Time Traveller) thought cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its markers in the end.”⁷ Wells’ future is a dismal one and the Time Traveller observes it dutifully: “Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and the gravities of terrestrial life. […] All the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence.”⁸ Wells’ work is nevertheless imaginative and groundbreaking, but SF needed further captivating influence to avoid going bland quickly. Much as was needed for Frankenstein to create his monster, revolutionary science needed to mediate with stranger, possibly pseudoscientific subject matters, in order to supplement creative thinking.

The religious backlash to the all-encompassing explanatory nature of the scientists of the time was intense. Paul Jerome Croce wrote of the beginnings of this culture war which first escalated in the middle of the 19th century: “This fraying of the culture over fundamental truths broke the edifice of consensus in nineteenth-century American culture and cracked the expectation of uniformities in thought and culture.”⁹ Jeffrey J. Kripal writes of the religious response, pointing to the resurrection of spiritualist beliefs: “The psychical rose into prominence at a particular moment in Western intellectual history, a moment when Darwinism, materialism, and agnosticism (a word newly coined by […] Huxley, to capture and advance the spirit of the new era), were becoming dominant.” The religious establishment and even those just wary of this cosmic pessimism felt that “the universe was looking more and more indifferent to human concerns with each new discovery and every passing year.” Some “chose to reject the science, or at least those parts of it that could not be reconciled with their particular belief system.”¹⁰ Indeed, even Darwin’s Bulldog, Huxley, promoted agnosticism, coining the term itself. This philosophy will find itself adopted by many of the authors examined in this book, principally the “hero” of it. The era needed an oddball to mediate, or perhaps lambast, both ideologies. Enter Charles Hoy Fort.

Fort was in some ways a failed fiction writer, selling a few short stories to magazines with the help of Theodore Dreiser, who saw great value in his work. Eventually, he became obsessed with pieces of abnormal data that science refused to explain or investigate. He wrote two works based upon theories surrounding his collation of anomalous data, X and Y, but these were never released and burned after the publication of his first two books. Some ideas from these volumes made their way into Fort’s non-fiction debut, The Book of the Damned (1919). The typical writing of Fort was an assortment of anomalous data which Fort came across in his meticulous reading through newspapers and scientific journals. The oddities were interspersed with Fort’s comments on the possibilities behind such occurrences, flip-flopping between serious and tongue-in-cheek. Some of the first phenomena he examined would remain a staple in his works to follow: Strange objects falling from the sky. Upon reading the entirety of Fort’s works, one would be hard-pressed to name a material that had not fallen from the sky.

L’Année Scientifique, 1888–75: That, Dec. 13, 1887, there fell, in Cochin China, a substance like blood, somewhat coagulated.¹¹

In Notes and Queries, 8– 6-190, it is said that, early in August, 1894, thousands of jellyfish, about the size of a shilling, had fallen at Bath, England.¹²

Annual Register, 1821–681: That, according to a report by M. Lainé, French Consul at Pernambuco, early in October, 1821, there was a shower of a substance resembling silk. The quantity was as tremendous as might be a whole cargo, lost somewhere between Jupiter or Mars, having drifted around perhaps centuries, the original fabrics slowly disintegrating.¹³

The list could go on. The common fall attributed to Fort is that of frogs, a phenomenon which occurred more often than might be assumed, mentioned in each of the first three books. These quoted selections are but a small sample from his first book, The Book of the Damned (1919), which was published with the help of Fort’s friend Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser is a key figure in Fort’s life, helping his fiction become published in magazines and eventually threatening to drop a publisher unless they released Fort’s first book. Sales were respectable enough to warrant the release of three more books, New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). These works continually expanded the type of anomalies Fort covered, eventually spanning practically the full gamut of paranormal events. In Wild Talents, for instance, he cited reports of poltergeists and spontaneous combustion, sometimes of the human variety.

There is a story of “devilish manifestations,” in the Quebec Daily Mercury, Oct. 6, 1880. For two weeks, in the Hudson Hotel, in the town of Hudson, on the Ottawa River, furniture had been given to disorderly conduct: the beds had been especially excitable. A fire had broken out in a stall in the stable. This fire was quenched, but another fire broke out. A priest was sent for, and he sprinkled the stable with holy water. The stable burned down.¹⁴

Fort was primarily interested in finding these reported anomalies and did not attempt to go and investigate himself. He simply offered his opinion on how scientists responded to these events with hyper-rational skepticism, no matter how improbable their answer may have been. He was interested in keeping science honest, endlessly wary of science not accepting anything that breached its specific rational data set.

Likewise, Fort pitted himself against the scientific culture of the time. While this aligned him with the goals of the religious establishment, he was equally skeptical of religion. But he mainly took issue with scientific dogmatism and the idea that humanity knew all that it could ever know. His work was almost entirely composed of secret knowledge: “The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.”¹⁵ To fight this battle, he took a bold but peculiar offensive. “I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions, ultra-respectable but covered with the dust of disregard,” wrote Fort. “I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data. They will march.”¹⁶ Determined to collect and preserve the oddities which science could not explain, Fort became “America’s unique literary phenomenon, the ‘foe of science.’”¹⁷ Biographer Jim Steinmeyer writes in his introduction to Fort’s collected works: “Fort deliberately pushed his ‘damned facts’ on his readers,” and negotiated with the fact that “science couldn’t explain (them) and, even worse, it seemed determined not to try.”¹⁸ His negative view of science is all too evident in his more scathing passages: “Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts. To a believer, the effect of the contemplation of a science is of being in the presence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. But what he is awed by is Mutilation.”¹⁹ Fort is critical of Darwin in particular, making the claim that his theories could be proven just as well as Darwin’s. “The fittest survive,” he writes. “What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest—weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. ‘Fitness’ then, is only another name for ‘survival.’ Darwinism: That survivors survive.”²⁰ While Fort’s theories lack the scientific merit that could even marginally discredit evolutionary science, his beautifully prosaic style and combative tone are an eccentric breath of fresh air in a smog of dogmatism. For these reasons, he was able to gain a respectable number of disciples.

Others were not so accepting. H.G. Wells received a copy of Lo! gifted to him from Dreiser. He was not happy with the gift.

Lo! has been sent to me but has gone into my wastepaper basket. And what do you mean by forcing “orthodox science” to do this or that? Science is a continuing exploration and how in the devil can it have an orthodoxy? The next you’ll be writing is the “dogmas of science” like some blasted Roman Catholic priest on the defensive. When you tell a Christian you don’t believe some yarn he can’t prove, he always calls you “dogmatic.” Scientific workers are first rate stuff and very ill paid and it isn’t for the likes of you and me to heave Forts at them.

The unhappy Wells ended his letter bitterly: “God dissolve (and forgive) your Fortean Society.”²¹

As badly received as Fort’s works were by Wells, they remained influential to SF. Before he delved into research, Fort himself was a fiction writer and presented some of the first instances of numerous ideas present in SF, particularly the concept that we are but small pieces in a larger, vastly more intelligent system. “It is of some note that Fort was writing during a time in which the terms and rules of the science fiction genre had not yet been established,” writes Kripal. Indeed, Fort’s own fiction writing was pioneering despite its lack of success or recognition. An early short story, “A Radical Corpuscle,” was markedly proto–SF, involving a group of cells who become aware that they are living within another organism, “a larger, cosmic body.”²² The concept of this short story sounds radically innovative for its publication date of 1906 but did not make enough waves to be considered influential. His non-fiction works, however, were more accessible and captivating to readers. They tread similar territory to “A Radical Corpuscle,” postulating that humanity knows very little about how the world works and that we are perhaps mere playthings to a vastly superior force. “I think we’re property,” wrote Fort. “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.”²³ It is here that Fort seems to predict the coming of what now is considered the flying saucer phenomenon, a key component to modern science fiction: “We shall have data as convincing as our data of oil or coal-burning (that of) aerial super-constructions.”²⁴ The serious nature of Fort’s hypothesizing sets him apart from Wells and his Martian spaceships. Wells’ vision is pure fantasy, but Fort theorizes that the data shows the possibility that UFOs are more than mere whimsies of imagination. Fort compares humanity to cattle, ignorantly blissful of the fact that they are possessed by something greater and unseen. The only hint of this presence is in the glimpses of the anomalous phenomena which Fort meticulously catalogued. Fort was convinced that science ignored these “damned facts” because the conclusions to be drawn by them were uncomfortable: Humanity does not actually know its place in the universe and is, in fact, a tiny corpuscle in a vast organism. Fort’s system could expand endlessly—atoms within molecules within cells within organisms. These ideas are now commonplace generic traits of SF, but oftentimes Fort goes uncredited as one of the original minds behind this concept of being property, playthings of the gods. This is a disturbing hypothesis, echoed by both the SF community and the paranormal non-fiction community, perhaps speaking to a common human anxiety.

Opposed to the public image that Wells’ staunchly anti–Fort view might imply, Fort had followers. His philosophy drew in a broad swath of New York writers, beginning with Dreiser and extending to others once Fort’s works reached a larger audience. The Fortean Society was organized in 1931 by Fort’s greatest supporter Dreiser and drew in a varied crowd of New York’s literati. Amongst them were Tiffany Thayer (who would later lead the society into disarray), Booth Tarkington, and fascinatingly some members of the Algonquin Round Table such as Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott. Even famed screenwriter Ben Hecht was a member, writing a favorable review of The Book of the Damned while still a newspaperman. “I am the first disciple of Charles Fort,” he wrote. “He has made a terrible onslaught upon the accumulated lunacy of fifty centuries. […] Whatever the purpose of Charles Fort, he has delighted me beyond all men who have written books in this world.”²⁵ The Society also drew in the beginnings of Fort’s SF influence; characters like Edmond Hamilton began to correspond with Fort and from overseas, and Eric Frank Russell contributed to the Society’s journal.²⁶ The Fortean Society has continued to exist in some form or another into the present, eventually becoming the International Fortean Organization when the remainder of the original society’s materials fell into the hands of the Willis brothers, Paul and Ron.

Fort’s works were more than just theories that resembled SF. Fort also had a strange and often indeterminate philosophy weaved throughout his texts. The most intriguing sections from a literary standpoint are when he makes bold claims like “we belong to something.” But, he would further claim of existence, “that ours is a pseudo-existence, and that all appearances in it partake of its essential fictitiousness.”²⁷ This claim and similar philosophies weave their way into both prominent maybe-fiction and SF texts, notably Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (examined thoroughly in Chapter 6). Kripal notes that Fort’s 1925 work, New Lands, “is about us as someone else’s adventure and land.”²⁸ As later Fortean researcher John A. Keel would put it, “this planet has always been a Disneyland for the Gods.”²⁹ These perspectives resemble the modern-day SF concept of living in a computer simulation, except for many Forteans this is a genuine possibility. There is also a hint of monism in Fort’s works, as Steinmeyer points out, quoting an excerpt from one of Fort’s short stories: “Martin Gardner and Ian Kidd have analyzed Charles Fort’s monistic philosophy, a search to identify continuity through all things: ‘That all things are one, that all phenomena are governed by the same laws; that whatever is true or what we call true, of planet, plants and magnets, is true of human beings.’”³⁰ Indeed, Fort believed that much of the phenomena he was investigating came from similar or the same sources. As for his view on the nature of reality, Fort’s “A Radical Corpuscle” gives a good insight: We are akin to cells living within a body, but that body may very well be one of many cells inside of another body. “If our existence is a relationship between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute, the quest for finality in it is hopeless,” he writes. “Everything in it must be relative, if the ‘whole’ is not a whole, but is, itself, a relation.”³¹

However, a skeptical mind must shudder to think that Fort postulated the existence of a Super-Sargasso Sea called Genesistrine which would every now and then dump some sort of material onto the Earth, organic or inorganic, explaining the weird data which Fort logged obsessively. But Fort’s work cannot be shoved aside as blatant pseudoscience; within its vast array of anomalous data, a complex and intriguing philosophy unfolds. Upon reading Fort, it is hard to treat him as a full-blown, fringe wingnut. He seems intelligent and completely aware of how improbable his theories were. Perhaps he reasoned that the only way to battle the absurd was to explain it away tongue-in-cheek with more absurdity. It makes Fort both endearing and readable in the face of what some would call eccentric anti-scientific chaff. Maybe it is anti-scientific chaff, but this conclusion seems to matter very little because of the interesting nature of the curiosities he investigated. The nature of his material is perhaps the reason why his influence has remained so firmly in place within both SF and maybe-fiction.

While Fort’s work may give the impression of an eccentric man who could easily be a hermit, the nickname given to him, “the hermit of the Bronx,” was not entirely accurate. Damon Knight writes that “people forget he was a newspaper reporter. He lived most of his life in tenements and he had a sociable wife. […] He did not see its inhabitants quite as anyone else saw them, but he knew and loved them.”³² Fort is largely described as quiet and reserved, but he engaged in regular conversation with some of the most prestigious literary figures of New York. In London, he also took great joy in going to Hyde Park, “where he had found a congenial group of loungers to argue with.”³³ While Fort enjoyed his solitude, his work was not that of an isolated mind; rather, it was a carefully established philosophy that he developed through dialogues with others, many who were notable minds of the era. This is perhaps part of the reason why Fort’s ideas spread amongst the literary community; his philosophy was novel yet accessible enough for this spread to take place.

Fort’s health began to fail while he was writing his final book, Wild Talents, in 1932. Knight writes of his sad final day:

Fort would not see a doctor, but on the morning of May 3 he was so weak that Anna called an ambulance and had him taken to Royal Hospital. (Aaron) Sussman brought him advance copies of Wild Talents, but he could not lift his hand to take them. He died that day.³⁴

His wife, Anna, died five years later. Before her death, she recalled to Dreiser an experience where the deceased Fort came back to comfort her after an argument with his aunt. “I was never so glad to see anyone in my whole life,” she said.³⁵ It is difficult to deny the poetry of Fort making a posthumous appearance, adding his own personal addition to the myriad reports of strange phenomena. Yet this is not the only instance of the spirit of Fort living on; the spirit of his work wove its way into literature, SF and maybe-fiction specifically, for years to come.

Fort’s influence on these genres truly began when his works were republished in pulp SF magazines. Kripal notes that SF had not yet become an established genre, the works of Wells and Verne still considered “voyages extraordinaires” and “scientific romances.” “It was the American pulp magazines of the 1920s—so named after the thick, cheap, and quickly yellowing paper on which they were published—that science fiction came into its own and was first named as such.”³⁶ Kripal further notes that the first pulp was published the same year as Fort’s The Book of the Damned, in 1919. Perhaps this is some supernatural synchronicity; SF and Fort’s relationship to one another has been tightly knit ever since. Fort’s work appeared in Astounding Stories with sections of Lo! appearing two years after his death. It was promoted as “the greatest collation of factual data on superscience in existence.”³⁷ To see it alongside SF stories is not altogether surprising because of the fantastic nature of Fort’s research. The table of contents lists the Lo! excerpt as the “Fact Feature” of the issue, again not seeming to hierarchize either fact or fiction.³⁸ Besides, as Fort would postulate, maybe our reality is nothing but a higher intelligence’s fiction. The editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, intended to “inject new life into a field which was rutted by habit-driven vehicles” via what he called “thought-variants,” an idea whose precursor was Fort.³⁹ Dave Langford continues to postulate on this influence in an article about Eric Frank Russell:

The SF hacks, while paying lip service to scientific dogma, were just as keen as Fort to locate science’s contradictions and loopholes—preferably loopholes wide enough to drive faster-than-light spaceships through, in defiance of Einstein’s tiresome speed limits. It made for better stories.⁴⁰

Langford notes the key balance SF must strike between science and Forteana, but also says the oft-repeated notion that Fortean thought served as an excellent source for good SF stories. Pulp fiction’s investment in Fortean subjects serves the dual purpose of highlighting works influential to the SF genre and including those works in order to sell magazines to SF fans who would have an interest in this type of material. (Writing as a fan of both SF and maybe-fiction, it must be said that the major draw to each are the narratives which both mirror and distort our own reality. These are not unlike genres.) “This is how Fort’s career in science fiction began,” writes Kripal. “As fiction and fact wrapped up in fantasy.”⁴¹ There is another a moment of indebtedness to Fort in the pulps when the editor of Fantastic Story, Samuel Mines, wrote: “No truly complete understanding of science fiction is possible without at least a nodding acquaintance with the works of Charles Fort.”⁴² Even before Fort’s actual appearance in the pulps, some writers already exhibited his influence in their pulp SF short stories and novellas. Yet some writers, often from the same publishing circles as SF, continued Fort’s research in earnest. These writers opted to not merely inject Fort’s ideas into fiction, they continued researching the anomalous events that Fort saw plaguing the world. Fueled by an indeterminate mixture of human curiosity, anomalous experience, and perhaps the chance at monetary gain, maybe-fiction was born.

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1. Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Tor, 2002: 9.

2. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. New York: Airmont, 1895: 81.

3. Ibid., 113–114.

4. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1898: 273–274.

5. Partington, John S. “The Death of the Static: H.G. Wells and the Kinetic Utopia.” Utopian Studies 11, no. 2 (2000): 96.

6. Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003: 319–320.

7. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. New York: Airmont, 1895: 125.

8. Ibid.

9. Croce, Paul Jerome. “Science and Religion.” Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, Volume 1. Ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999: 483.

10. Kripal, Jeffrey J. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010: 40.

11. Fort, Charles. The Books of Charles Fort. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1941: 40.

12. Ibid., 48.

13. Ibid., 59.

14. Ibid., 919.

15. Fort, Charles. The Booked of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort. New York: Tarcher/Perigree, 2008: 3.

16. Ibid., 11.

17. Steinmeyer, Jim. “Introduction.” The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort. New York: Tarcher/Perigree, 2008: viii.

18. Ibid.

19. Fort, Charles. The Booked of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort. New York: Tarcher/Perigree, 2008: 1019.

20. Ibid., 24.

21. Steinmeyer, Jim. Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008: 255–256.

22. Kripal, Jeffrey J. Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015: 85.

23. Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort. New York: Tarcher/Penguin. 2008: 163.

24. Ibid.

25. Knight, Damon. Charles Fort—Prophet of the Unexplained: A Biography of the American Iconoclast Who Dared to Explain Centuries of Strange Occult Phenomena. Point Pleasant: New Saucerian Press, 1970: 70.

26. May, Andrew. Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. New York City: Springer International Publishing, 2017: 13.

27. Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort. New York: Tarcher/Penguin. 2008: 14.

28. Kripal, Jeffrey J. Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010: 129.

29. Keel, John A. Disneyland of the Gods. Seattle: New Saucerian Press, 1988: 77.

30. Steinmeyer, Jim. Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008: 182.

31. Ibid., 183.

32. Knight, Damon. Charles Fort—Prophet of the Unexplained: A Biography of the American Iconoclast Who Dared to Explain Centuries of Strange Occult Phenomena. Point Pleasant: New Saucerian Press, 1970: 47.

33. Ibid., 168.

34. Ibid., 184. (Aaron Sussman was a mutual friend of Thayer and Fort and helped found the Fortean Society.)

35. Ibid.

36. Kripal, Jeffrey J. Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015: 89.

37. Ibid., 90.

38. Tremaine, F. Orlin, editor. “Table of Contents.” Astounding Stories. New York: Street & Smith, April 1934: 3.

39. Ibid., 11.

40. Langford, Dave. “SF Books of the Damned.” Fortean Times Weird Year 1996. London: John Brown Publishing, 1996. Reprinted here: https://ansible.uk/writing/damned.html.

41. Kripal, Jeffrey J. Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015: 89.

42. Ibid., 90.