Joshua Blu Buhs, Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Pp. 384. ISBN 978-0-226-83148-1. $35.00 (cloth).
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: This is a fantastic book.I will never think the same again, particularly about science fiction and its conscious attempt to see and control the 'motor of history' in the weird.Think to New Worlds is about the reception history of Charles Hoyes Fort and the 'damned'; that is, that which has been excluded from modern thought and science.Fort authored one novel (The Outcast Manufacturers, 1909), and four books of anomalies drawn mostly from newspapers and journals (The Book of the Damned, 1919; New Lands, 1923; Lo! 1931; Wild Talents, 1932).Through the latter, he advanced a hilarious but also quite serious hyphenated intermediatism, which is what he called his own position: a truth-fiction (again, his own hyphenated expression), itself based on a monism or underlying oneness that he captured in the homely image of an all-encompassing cheese.All is cheese, including the mouse that appears in it for a time.Nothing that appears in the cheese is unreal, but neither is anything quite real.Except the cheese.The book is organized around the life of Tiffany Thayer (1902-59), who co-founded the Fortean Society and came to edit the society's magazine, Doubt.Buhs teaches us in biographical specificity about Thayer, who defined much of the movement from the 1930s until the last year of the 1950s, for better and for ill.Buhs does not sugarcoat.He also includes some bracing thoughts on the contemporary US political scene.Think to New Worlds is a literarily beautiful and intellectually sophisticated treatment of science fiction, surrealist and modern art, the UFO phenomenon (the cover is gorgeous), modernism and postmodernism, and conspiracy thinking in American politics.Buhs demonstrates any number of theses, including the theme that the literary history of Fort is the history of avant-garde modernism as it transitioned out of earlier Luciferian Romantic and decadent literature eras.Modernism, it turns out, is suffused with occultism and the amazing from the very beginning as forms of radical reflexivity, a kind of paradoxical (dis)enchantment that was at once sceptical and believing.In Fort, though, there is always a kind of laughing transcendence.For example, these 'talents,' as he called what some of our ancestors billed as 'witchcraft', happen in actual human history, but they are inevitably 'wild'; that is, not controllable and fundamentally mischievous.This does not quite place Fort in what would become postmodernism and the ironic rejection of all grand narratives and ontological truths.He was too much after that underlying oneness.Even more radically (and much more intermediate), perhaps the assumed distinction between experience and interpretation in the wild talents or witchcraft is mistaken from the start.Certainly, scholarship has challenged the distinction
Author: Jeffrey J. Kripal
Institution: Rice University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4412507655