Overview

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 occurrences: 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 adman, 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 is 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.

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9780226831480

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Reviews

“The apostle of wonder Charles Fort damned scientific expertise and modern institutions that ignored the anomalous, the marvelous, and the unforeseen. But what happened when his iconoclastic acolytes institutionalized Forteanism? In this deeply researched, original history, Buhs impressively excavates the little known, yet seminal, influence Forteanism had on aesthetic modernism, science fiction, Ufology, and contemporary conspiracy culture. Buhs reveals that Forteanism, usually regarded as a peripheral phenomenon, is actually central to any understanding of modernity’s perils and potentials.” -- Michael Saler, author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality

“The apostle of wonder Charles Fort damned scientific expertise and modern institutions that ignored the anomalous, the marvelous, and the unforeseen. But what happened when his iconoclastic acolytes institutionalized Forteanism? In this deeply researched, original history, Buhs impressively excavates the little-known, yet seminal, influence Forteanism had on aesthetic modernism, science fiction, UFOlogy, and contemporary conspiracy culture. Buhs reveals that Forteanism, usually regarded as a peripheral phenomenon, is actually central to any understanding of modernity’s perils and potentials.” -- Michael Saler, author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality “Marvelous, skeptical, conspiracist, ironic: Charles Fort’s modernism has pollinated many strange flowers in recent culture. This fascinating book introduces readers to the many (contradictory, unexpected) bearers of the label ‘Fortean’ in the hundred years since Fort’s The Book of the Damned was published, showing how art, literature, science, and politics all curved under its weird yet apparently inevitable gravitational pull. Buhs’s writing is sparkling, sprinkled with vignettes that pay homage to the bluster and whirl of Fort’s unmistakable style.” -- Charlotte Sleigh, author of The Paper Zoo: 500 Years of Animals in Art

Author Information

Joshua Blu Buhs is the author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend and The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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